Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Whooshing seedlings and squabbling stems: Ivon Hitchens at Pallant House reviewed

Flowers brought out the best in this English painter

Set down the secateurs, silence the strimmers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. Ivon Hitchens was a painter of hedgerow and undergrowth, bracken and bramble. Whoosh! go his seedlings, sprouting, bolting, demanding repotting. The first Hitchens you see on the wall outside this exhibition at Pallant House is his lithograph ‘Still Life’ (1938). A squabble of stems break bounds, vault the vase, bid for freedom. I’m a wildflower, get me out of here.

‘I love flowers for painting,’ Hitchens said. ‘Not a carefully arranged bunch such as people ought not to do — but doing a mixed bunch in a natural way.’ If his posies were ever bridal bouquets they have long since been thrown, trampled, sat on by an usher and shoved in an ice bucket to revive.

Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979) was a trier-outer. The early landscapes, such as ‘Didling on the Downs’ (1920s), are irresolute: sort of Seurat, semi-Cézanne. Hitchens’s ‘Curved Barn’ (1922) is a self-conscious tilt at Cézanne, cubism and Clive Bell’s woolly doctrine of ‘significant form’.

In the have-a-go 1920s, Hitchens dabbled with Bloomsbury — all that shrimp skin, all those bare bottoms in ‘The Pool’ (1927–8) owe something to Duncan Grant — and experimented with a style which, if not quite cubist, was certainly cub-ish. The Mr Blobby contours of Hitchens’s ‘Interiors at Barmoor Castle’ (1928) have, by the following year’s ‘Henry Moore at Work in his Studio, Parkhill Road, Hampstead’ (1929), hardened into something more dynamic and scalpel-edged.

In 1921 Hitchens exhibited with the Seven and Five Society, a changing cast of painters and sculptors committed to being uncommitted. There had of late, they argued, been too many isms, too many ‘warring sects’ and ‘too much pioneering along too many lines in altogether too much of a hurry’.

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