Lot 22
£35,201
Auction: The Dorothy Bohm Collection | 31 October 2024 | Lots 1 to 40
signed and dated 32 (lower left), oil on canvas
50.8cm x 76.2cm (20in x 30in)
with Leicester Galleries, London;
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, from whom acquired by Dorothy and Louis Bohm;
The Estate of Dorothy Bohm.
Blue River perfectly encapsulates Ivon Hitchens’ work of the early 1930s, his stylish, unique take on modernism that saw him elected to the prestigious Seven & Five Society. Yet this painting also presages the developments in his painting that were to come at the end of the decade, when his vision of the English landscape became increasingly abstracted, the scene before him dissolving into patterns of form and colour which then unfold across the canvas, creating an effect that Hitchens himself described as ‘a visual music’.
Hitchens had followed movements in European art very closely, ever since Roger Fry had enraged the British art establishment (and delighted British art students like Hitchens) with his ground-breaking exhibitions of French Post-Impressionism in 1910 and 1912. And in many ways, Hitchens’ work of the 1920s and early 30s is a synthesis of Cézanne, Braque and Matisse, albeit replacing the calme, luxe et volupté of Provence and the Côte d’Azur with a distinctly English palette of leaden blues, pinky greys and restrained greens in every shade.
In Blue River we can see these influences clearly: the black outlines on the hills and rocks evoking Matisse, whilst the flat application of blocks of paint – such as the division of the river into a checkerboard of blues – allude to Cubism’s play on perspective, constantly pulling our sense of this being a ‘view’ back to the surface of the canvas, to the making of the painting itself. Yet there are also motifs that are unique to Hitchens. On the left-hand edge, he has stacked forms - a large rock, swathe of meadow and then a stand of trees - to create a solid visual hold, from which the rest of the composition can unfurl. Then there is the exquisite balance between abstraction and figuration, with neither dominant, the sense of flatness and artifice held in tension with a very real sense of light and air. We can see too his variation of brushstrokes, from the broad to the spidery, and the subtle changes in the weighting of paint, between brushes dripping in pigment (which still seems wet, some 90 years later) to ones almost dry. All of this is most notable in the sky, in which broad brushes dipped in four shades of blue and one white dance across the surface of the canvas. Whilst this clearly has a (literal) atmospheric effect, if one views this section in isolation, it is remarkably free and abstract for the period. Indeed, it has something of Helen Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell about it, the way the brushmarks seem to hang off the surface of the canvas. It’s no wonder, perhaps, that Patrick Heron, the man who effectively interpreted American Abstract Expressionism to an unwitting British audience in the early 1950s, was also the author of the first full monograph on Hitchens in 1952, a book in which Heron often described Hitchens’ work in terms that Clement Greenberg, the great apologist of Abstract Expressionism, would have enjoyed.
There is a famous photograph, taken in 1931, the year before Blue River was painted, of Hitchens on the beach at Happisburgh in Norfolk, where he stands alongside Henry and Irina Moore, who in turn are next to Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson (at the start of their affair). Moore and Nicholson are stripped to the waist, Hepworth is tying her hair up, cigarette in mouth, her muscular sculptor’s arms exposed by the top half of a swimming costume. Hitchens, on the other hand, is fully dressed, in shirt, tie, pullover, his tweed jacket fully buttoned up, raincoat slung over his arm, his black beret the only possible nod to la vie bohème. At first glance, he seems like a fish out of water amongst these pioneers of British Modernism. Yet this is to miss the point: he is absolutely one of them. At this point in time, all of these bright young things of the British avant garde are still wedded to some sort of figuration, albeit one transformed thorough the lens of ‘modernist primitivism’ and Cubism. A painting such as Blue River, if looked at closely, is as modernist as anything else coming out of the Mall Studios, Herbert Read’s ‘nest of gentle artists’ shared by Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson, just down the road from Hitchens’ studio in Hampstead. As these Mall Studio artists moved towards abstraction – Hepworth and Nicholson in particular – Hitchens might well have remained wedded to depicting the landscape, but not because he couldn’t let go of the figurative. It was more that those values of simplicity, order and harmony that his contemporaries felt could only be uncovered in the realm of the abstract, were, for him, to be found everywhere in the landscape, out in the open, and all the more fascinating for being impermanent and accidental.