IVON HITCHENS PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
IVON HITCHENS
British, 1893-1979
BIOGRAPHY
Ivon Hitchens was born in London, "the son of the painter Alfred Hitchens. From 1911 to 1918 he studied at St. John’s Wood School of Art and at the Royal Academy, London. He was a member of the Seven and Five Society from 1922 to 1925, and joined the London Group in 1931, In 1940 he settled near Petworth in West Sussex.
"Hitchens is considered to be one of the most important British painters of his generation. There are two aspects to his work: one consisting of traditional figurative painting; and the other in an abstract style. His early paintings, dating from a period when he was influenced by Henri Matisse, are mostly of interiors in which the handling of space is the dominant concern. Just before 1935, and influenced by Ben Nicholson, he turned to still-life painting; his increasingly structural approach to this genre brought him to the edge of abstraction. Soon afterwards, Wassily Kandinsky's theories on abstraction and on the relationship between painting and music led Hitchens even further towards abstraction. From that time, around 1937, he adopted the long, horizontal format that typifies his later work.
"After moving to Sussex, Hitchens produced many series of landscapes in this format, repeatedly returning to each subject just as Claude Monet had done in his Haystacks series. In these landscapes, Hitchens reconciled his objective ap-proach to painting with the principles of pure abstraction and with the expression of sensations that inspired him to paint these scenes, in which light melds together vegetation, water and sky. The paintings from this period have a lyrical abstraction whose emotional content, rather than the sub-ject matter itself, is the defining factor. He executed these paintings with wide, mostly lateral brushstrokes, using bright, fluid colors on a white background, which is translucent with a few patches of impasto.
"At the same time as his abstract paintings, Hitchens also painted classic subjects and created compositions with figures, particularly in the murals he made for the British Society of Popular Dance and Song in London, in 1954, and for Sussex University, near Brighton, in 1960. Having absorbed several influences, he broke away from conventional landscape painting, but perpetuated the tradition of British land-scape painting, just as Constable and Turner had done before him.
"He took part in many group exhibitions, including the Exposition d'Art Moderne (Exhibition of Modern Art) organised by UNESCO, and the Exposition des Tableaux Britanniques Modernes de la Tate Gallery (Exhibition of Modern British Paintings from the Tate Gallery) at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, in Paris in 1946, and the 1956 Venice Biennale. Between 1925 and 1962, Hitchens also had 19 solo exhibitions in London, as well as retrospectives in Leeds in 1945, and at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1963, at the Royal Academy in London in 1979, and at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1989."
[Benezit, Dictionary of Artists, Paris, 2006, pp. 133-4]
Museum Collections
AUSTRALIA
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
CANADA
Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Art Gallery of Vancouver
FRANCE
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
NEW ZEALAND
Bishop Suter Art Gallery, Nelson
National Gallery of New Zealand, Wellington
NORWAY
National Gallery, Oslo
SOUTH AFRICA
Tatham Art Gallery, Natal
SWEDEN
Gothenburg Art Museum
UNITED STATES
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Smith Art Museum, Northampton, MA
Seattle Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
Toledo Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT
UNITED KINGDOM
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Barnsley: Cannon Hall Museum and Art Gallery
Bath Art Gallery
Bedford: Cecil Higgins Museum and Art Gallery
Belfast: Ulster Museum
Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery
Bradford City Art Gallery
Brighton Art Gallery
Bristol: City Museum and Art Gallery
Bury Art Gallery
Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum
Cardiff: National Museum of Wales
Chichester: Pallant House Gallery
Eastbourne: Towner Art Gallery
Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modem Art
Glasgow Art Gallery
Harrogate Art Gallery
Huddersfield Art Gallery
Kettering Art Gallery
Kingston-upon-Hull: Ferens Art Gallery
Leamington Spa: Warwick District Council Art Gallery and Museum
Leeds: City Art Galleries
Leicester: City Museum and Art Gallery
Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery
London: Courtauld Institute Galleries
Tate Gallery
Victoria & Albert Museum
Manchester: City Art Galleries
Whitworth Art Gallery
Middlesbrough Art Gallery
Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Laing Art Gallery
Norwich: Castle Museum
Nottingham: Castle Museum and Art Gallery
Oxford: Ashmolean Museum
Rochdale Art Gallery
Salford Art Gallery
Sheffield: City Art Galleries
Southampton Art Gallery
Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery
Wakefield: City Museum and Art Gallery
