Roger Hilton

Jonathan Clark Fine Art (by appointment)
18 Park Walk, London SW10 0AQ <info@jcfa.co.uk>

Why do some artists receive more attention than others? Clearly some appeal to the popular imagination – the young David Hockney, bottle-blond and sporting a gold lamé jacket, first seized attention in the Sixties and has never since relinquished it – while others may enjoy high reputation among their peers without becoming more generally known. Roger Hilton (1911-75) was an artist who occasionally made the headlines (people still remember a widely-syndicated newspaper photo of him aiming a wild kick at his John Moores prize-winning painting in 1961), but he never sustained a high media profile like Hockney or John Bratby. Today Hilton has a cult following but his work is hardly familiar to the greater gallery-going public. When St Ives artists are mentioned Patrick Heron or Sir Terry Frost are the names that leap to mind; and for a more informed audience, Peter Lanyon. Rarely will Hilton be remarked upon, yet he was one of the most original painters to make his home in post-war Cornwall, and it is high time that he was publicly recognized as such.

Part of the problem (a situation spot-lighted by a recent exhibition at Jonathan Clark Fine Art in Chelsea) is that not enough top quality paintings by Hilton appear on the market. Auctions are regularly strewn with ‘major’ works by Heron, Frost, Lanyon or William Scott, but prime Hiltons rarely emerge. There are plenty of his works on paper about (Hilton was an inspired draughtsman and worked to great effect in gouache in his last years), but good canvases are hardly ever seen in auction rooms. This is not because Hilton painted little – his production of oils did not slow until the mid-to-late 1960s, which allowed for more than a dozen years of prime output – but because his paintings are so highly valued that their owners do not willingly part with them. And they are widely dispersed, not just through Britain but also in Europe, America and Australia. The paintings that have appeared in recent years hail mostly from private collections in Italy, Germany or Switzerland. Anyone attempting a catalogue raisonné of Hilton’s paintings would need to search extensively.

Dancing Nude 1974
Roger Hilton
charcoal & gouache on paper
initialled & dated
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in / 29.8 x 21 cm
© Jonathan Clark Fine Art, Representatives of the Artist’s Estate

Untitled 1974
Roger Hilton
gouache on paper
initialled & dated
21 x 15 3/4 in / 53.3 x 40 cm
© Jonathan Clark Fine Art, Representatives of the Artist’s Estate

Hilton has not been well-served by the nation’s museums. The last public gallery showing was at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2008, an exhibition of some fifty works which included a number of unfamiliar items. Although it was a good selection and was seen by a usefully varied audience, it wasn’t in London. The last London museum show was at the Hayward Gallery in 1993, billed as a retrospective, but actually a small and unimpressive group of work which did Hilton no favours. The Hayward show was generally regarded as a missed opportunity, yet the challenge of showing Hilton properly and in-depth in the metropolis has not been taken up. Tate St Ives gave him a solo show in 2006-7, a dubious honour that usually means that the London Tate feels its responsibility to exhibit an artist has been discharged. I know of no plans for other Hilton museum shows, and in the interim, the onus inevitably falls on commercial galleries. Jonathan Clark mounted a vivacious Hilton exhibition in 2011, entitled Going out with a Bang, but his latest offering, last November-December, was altogether more substantial.

Besides showing work from the artist’s estate – some of it not previously exhibited – Clark had sourced several oil paintings of real presence. Chief among these wasDecember 1961, a five-foot wide canvas suggestive of the sweep of moorland, punctuated with Hilton’s typical pannier shapes, like saddlebags hanging from a dipping rope, semi-circular, oval or rectangular in section. The imagery is resolutely abstract but usually refers to man’s handiwork rather than nature’s. The paint is applied with verve and expressive freedom, always on the edge of appearing careless, but actually perfectly controlled. Charcoal and painted lines alternate with different depths of paint. The white of the canvas is much employed (in other words, important sections of the picture surface are left unpainted), but in one area it is enhanced by white paint. The palette ranges from burnt sienna through umbers and ochres to vermilion. Black is a constant of various moods.

Other paintings of weight included June 1958 – Green, a variant on Hilton’s largest ever painting The Aral Sea, featuring archaic imagery (like less specific cave painting) within the broadly brushed main boat shape of this vibrant but mysterious composition. Much of the enjoyment of this picture resides in the way the paint has been applied (the variety of mark from brisk brushiness to wandering line), and how the colours abut or lie over each other. July 1960 is another remarkable oil, constructed with more clarity of solid and void, and evocative (without being illustrative) of the Cornish cliffs in a potent sense of edge and fall. However, it can be persuasively argued that Hilton was always more interested in the human body and how it related to its immediate environment than he was in landscape.

Compare two late gouache drawings from 1974: Dancing Nude and Untitled. They illustrate rather well the ways in which figuration and abstraction were interlocked for Hilton. In the nude, a female body is evoked through speedy but slightly jerky charcoal lines, with abstract accents of red and blue paint to bring a sense of dynamism to the image. Untitled, on the other hand, is composed simply of two highly-assured shapes: a question mark and a boomerang, in fruitful juxtaposition. Hilton has drawn them with spirited economy in black gouache, and yet somehow they contain as much information about a dancing figure as the more obviously descriptive nude. The abstracted shorthand of Untitled is all poetic compression, taut and highly disciplined, whereas Dancing Nude is more obvious and diffuse in its effects, but both use abstraction inventively, and both summon up the human figure with a bold and unequivocal sense of celebration. Hilton’s great gift lay in making the creative dialogue between abstraction and figuration both relevant and accessible: a supremely difficult accomplishment.