Footnotes

Provenance
With New Art Centre, London, circa 1970, where purchased by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

The mid-to-late 1950s saw turbulent times for Roger Hilton. Artistically, he was wrestling with the problem of how an artist develops upon abstraction. Professionally, he chose to cut ties with his long-time dealer, Gimpel Fils, due to perceived pressures to mould his output into a more commercial form, leaving him in a position of financial uncertainty. And personally, his marriage to Ruth David was waning, ultimately ending in divorce.

Yet these years bore triumphs. Hilton's first retrospective was held at the ICA in early 1958, which led to the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council both making their first acquisitions of his work, with further purchases made by both the following year along with the Gulbenkian Foundation and Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. He was awarded a prize at the prestigious John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool in 1959 and his work was included in several important mixed exhibitions such as the 1957 Lawrence Alloway organised Metavisual Tachiste Abstract: Painting in England Today.

Out of this period, both personally and artistically, several key developments emerge. In the summer of 1956, he took a studio in St Ives and then in Newlyn the following three years, beginning an engagement with the South-West that would later be cemented by a permanent move. In London too he found a new studio in St. John's Wood, in which he would increasingly reside when in the capital. At the end of the decade Hilton joined the stable of Waddington Galleries, who offered the security of a £360-a-year stipend, which enabled him to give up his teaching position at the Central School of Art and led to a series of highly praised and commercially successful exhibitions. And by 1959 he had met fellow painter Rose Phipps, who would spend that summer with him in Newlyn, and who he would later marry.

Dating to October of that very year, the present work, and other such examples, display a new bravado from an artist who had already developed a highly confident manner of working. The hardened edges of his earlier neo-plastic forms give way to rolling masses, armatures and details utilised in such a balanced economy of mark-making that they become highly suggestive. An audaciousness enters his technique; charcoal traditionally associated with underpaintings is purposefully laid bare or, as in the current example, unmixed pigment is tubed directly onto the canvas. Whilst his idiom presents initially as abstract, reference points are increasingly identifiable with his most returned to source being the female form. Writing in 1961, Hilton concluded how at least artistically he had resolved the various quandaries this period had presented him with:

'Abstraction in itself is nothing. It is only a step towards a new sort of figuration, that is, one which is more true. However beautiful they may be, one can no longer depict women as Titian did. Renoir in his last pictures had already greatly modified her shape... For an abstract painter there are two ways out or on: he must give up painting and take to architecture, or he must reinvent figuration' (ex.cat., Roger Hilton & Alan Bowness, Roger Hilton, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, 1961)