Ivon Hitchens

(British, 1893-1979)

Interior, Red Sunlight 50.8 x 76.7 cm. (20 x 30 1/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by
A. Heberge
Sale; Christie's, London, 9 November 1990, lot 264, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Tate Gallery, Ivon Hitchens, 11 July-18 August 1963, cat.no.134; this exhibition travelled to Bradford, City Art Gallery, 31 August-22 September and Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, 28 September-20 October
Worthing, Worthing Art Gallery, Ivon Hitchens: Exhibition of Paintings, 7 May-4 June 1966, cat.no.10
London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens: Retrospective Exhibition, 16 May-9 June 1973, cat.no.10
Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery, Ivon Hitchens: A Retrospective Exhibition, 30 September-29 October 1978, cat.no.10
London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens: Paintings from 1930-1974, 3-27 February 1982, cat.no.9
London, Jonathan Clark, Ivon Hitchens, 10 May-9 June 2000, cat.no.13 (col.ill.)

Literature
Alan Bowness (ed.), Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, London, 1973, cat.no.47 (col.ill.)
Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, André Deutsch, London, 1990, cat.no.55 (col.ill.)

Interior: Red Sunlight marks a moment of transition in Hitchens' career, when the artist's exploration of colour, light and space reached a new intensity. The painting exemplifies his conviction, expressed in a 1951 letter to Herbert Read, that "colour is space and space is colour", a principle that would underpin his entire practice. Hitchens' art resists simple categorisation: his sensuousness and rhythmic brushwork stem from the Fauves, while his organisation of forms as interlocking planes of colour reveals the influence of Cubism. Yet in his hands, these influences were transformed into a language entirely his own, a balance of abstraction and figuration grounded in lived experience.

The 1960s proved a defining decade for Hitchens. In June of 1960, Interior: Red Sunlight was included in his first solo exhibition at Waddington Galleries, beginning a long relationship with the gallery that continued until his death. Three years later, in 1963 and marking Hitchens' 70th year, the Tate Gallery staged a major retrospective of his work. Its inclusion in such a landmark exhibition underlined the painting's importance within Hitchens' oeuvre and helped consolidate his reputation on a national stage.

In the present work, a female figure emerges from a space alive with colour, her body curved, arms raised behind her head and her outline echoed in the surrounding space. A flood of vibrant red falls across her legs and onto the floor below, suggesting the warmth of sunlight filtering into the room. Hitchens abstracts the pictorial structure from direct visual reality, planes, screens and pulses of colour organize the composition, while the figure retains a sense of presence and vitality. As Patrick Heron noted in his monograph on the artist, Hitchens' nudes "have the voluptuousness, eroticism, and true 'glamour' of lovely women, naked and at ease," fully alive within the space of the painting rather than reduced to symbolic form. (Patrick Heron, Ivon Hitchens, London, Penguin, 1955, p.12).

This period coincided with Hitchens's growing confidence in the expressive potential of simplified forms. As Peter Khoroche observed, he was "feeling his way towards a still greater freedom in composition and with it an expansion of his colour range." That freedom became more pronounced after 1965, when Hitchens moved to Selsey, West Sussex, beginning what Khoroche called "a new period in his painting." (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Farnham, Lund Humphries, 2007).

Interior: Red Sunlight can be seen as both a summation of his practice to this point and also as a new departure. Grounded in figuration yet pushing towards greater abstraction, it demonstrates the assured handling of colour and space that defined Hitchens's reputation. Its prominent inclusion in key exhibitions signals its status within his oeuvre: a painting that captures the artist on the cusp of the bold, expansive vision of his later years.

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.