ART
Ivon Hitchens at the Leicester Galleries
Six of the pictures in Ivon Hitchens' exhibition of recent-work seem to me to be the best he has ever painted, and that means they are very good indeed. There is a general absence of the slightness that has sometimes in the past seemed to satisfy him too easily— though it was always an exquisite slightness—and there is a gain in intensity. In some pictures, notably in the simpler flower pieces, he is marking time, and in a few of the more formalised paintings, such as Boy with Chessboard, the forms are imperfectly realised. He shows, as always, a lack of interest in the conventional .reality and earthiness of forms, but communicates by his colour symbols a strong poetic feeling for such things as a damp autumnal landscape or a vista through a wood-clearing, without referring to their formality at all. This capacity has encouraged some people to call him a decorative painter, but at his best the feeling is conveyed so clearly that the works are carried far beyond mere decoration.
His colour is brighter than before and there is no loss of subtlety, though there is a loss of one predominant range of rich, sombre
colours that he had allowed-us to become used to, and that appears here only now and again—as in No. 16, Dark Landscape. In the Flower Group, No. 6, he has found a new series of glowing harmonies of colour that strike me as being as beautiful as they are original for him, or for anyone.
In the other rooms are shown the collection of prints of the late Sir Michael Sadler. Such artists as Manet, Forain, Rouault, Picasso, Matisse' Daumier, Vuillard and Gauguin are admirably represented —the last three by many lithographs. JOHN PIPER.
Previous page
