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Thursday 4 December 2008

Take your pick

Robert Dukes (born 1965) is one of our finest younger artists.

The Friends’ Room at the Royal Academy is often overlooked as a Central London venue, partly because it’s usually packed with RA Friends having coffee or lunch. However, it’s open free to the public every day from 4 to 6 p.m., and until 25 June a fascinating exhibition of paintings and drawings by Tristram Hillier (1905–83) is showing there. Hillier is one of those artists affiliated to the Surrealist movement, whose work was always more independent and individual than any ism could allow. A meticulous craftsman whose paintings are rigorously built on painstaking draughtsmanship, Hillier was influenced by Cubism before succumbing briefly to the lure of Surrealism. An early coloured pencil drawing ‘Object on a Beach’ (1935) recalls the Surrealist works of Picasso besides looking very like a John Banting. Hillier, like his near-contemporary John Armstrong, is really a classical painter rather than a Surrealist, and he was a master of crisp, rather chilly landscapes and coastal townscapes. They often look as if something is about to happen, and the mood can verge on the ominous. What peculiarities of temperament gave rise to Hillier’s glacial treatment may be gleaned from a new study of his work entitled Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier by Jenny Pery (Royal Academy, £25). This handsome and highly illustrated hardback should help to put Hillier back on the map: I look forward to reading it.

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