Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the late husband of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

This untitled 1968 canvas by Roger Hilton was painted at a time of low productivity for the artist. His international reputation was already firmly established after being awarded the UNESCO prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale. The following year, in July 1965, he married Rose Phipps and the couple moved from London to Cornwall with their young family, making home in a remote cottage on Botallack Moor, near St. Just. Hilton's studio was created on the first floor of the family home which meant that interruptions to his painting were more common. His good friend, the poet W.S. Graham (1918-1986) was visiting with greater regularity and their heavy drinking sessions caused serious upheaval to the continuity of Hilton's work. By 1968 this resulted in him spending twelve weeks in The Priory Hospital in Roehampton for addiction. It was supposed to be for a period of six months, but Hilton checked himself out to receive his CBE award at Buckingham Palace and never returned.

Andrew Lambirth comments on this time, 'Despite these upsets and traumas, or perhaps because of them (it is never quite clear what it took to kick-start Hilton), there are a number of good paintings dating from 1968.' (Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton, The Figured Language of Thought, Thames & Hudson, London, 2007, 220). He goes on to describe the merits of Hilton's Brown Figure of 1968 with its 'bold design' 'undulant buttocks' and 'the whole image painted in organic yellows and browns' which 'relies principally on the subtle interplay of negative and positive shapes'. Whilst the present lot, painted the same year, bears no title it has almost certainly derived from Brown Figure and progressed still further into abstraction. Its gently undulating horizontal bands of ochre and orange have been softened when compared to the dramatic movements of Brown Figure, although the forms sill extend off the edges of the canvas. Any reference to the human body has all but disappeared, yet the brown form on the lower edge still hints at a tantalizing glimpse of human buttocks with the large irregular quadrilateral suspended above suggesting 'a head like a bean or the glans of a penis' Lambirth comments on Brown Figure. The lowest point of the quadrilateral is provocatively positioned so that it almost touches, indeed penetrates the cleft beneath, so that the 'unmistakably sexualised' nature of Brown Figure referenced by Lambirth is reiterated in this rhythmic, untitled canvas.