Sensuality and austerity in the work of Roger Hilton

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Roger Hilton: Swinging out into the Void

Andrew Lambirth, Luke Elwes and Anett Hauswald

Roger Hilton: Swinging Out Into the Void offers an introduction to Britain’s best abstract expressionist artist for a general art audience and makes available a range of decent (if occasionally slightly hard) reproductions of Hilton’s oils from 1953–65 at an attractive price.

Andrew Lambirth discusses Hilton’s painterliness well: the opposition of strong colours and the areas of deliberately crude scribbled handling, producing ‘a strange middle-ground between beauty and ugliness’. Lambirth rejects the idea of the dominance of landscape meaning in Hilton’s late 1950s oils, but counters that somewhat by suggesting that they become more ‘outdoor’ in feeling, conveying a sense of nature in its elemental rather than scenic aspect.

This seems fine as far as it goes, but does not explain why, during this same period, Hilton’s art shuttled between poles of sensuality (relating to nature and the body) and austerity. In a more general way, the paintings seem to invite the spectator to relish and ‘read’ them, only then to refuse to allow the viewer to get any easy handle on them. This dialectic of attracting spectators and then frustrating any normative ‘reading’ in terms of either pure form or clear imagery could have been related to a pattern of tacit thought (or aesthetic behaviour) found with some awkwardly recalcitrant artists of the modern era.

Such self-possessive individuals found themselves operating in a market situation where collectors wanted to possess the products of the artist’s labour as pleasure, newness or ideological signs of selfhood. This art world itself operated within a broader existentialist culture, celebrating both the inability to align ideologically with either side of the cold war and the heroic value of internal resistance to the world’s allures. Lambirth’s writing shies away from any such real-world cultural and historical context in favour of art appreciation and more localized biographical context.

The other two essays in this catalogue attempt to make the work alive for us today. Thus, the painter Luke Elwes was invited to make a contemporary painter’s response. At the core of his text is a very strained deployment of an essay by Adam Phillips on the ‘modeller’ and ‘carver’ as different kinds of art-making mentality (itself a warming over of the aesthetic theory of the critic Adrian Stokes from over 70 years ago). Elwes sees in Hilton’s work a tension between the carving mentality (his formal control) and the modelling mentality (his ‘darker impulses’). Elwes sets himself up as an artist perspicacious enough to champion the aesthetic density of Hilton’s work as a counterpoint to the limiting blankness, irony, or clever referencing of today’s postmodernism. The comparisons that he finally makes with contemporary artists (Sean Scully, Tony Bevan, Sarah Lucas, Tracy Emin, and Cecily Brown), however, seem questionable.

Anett Hauswald’s essay, a meandering series of ‘Thoughts on the Europeanness of Roger Hilton’, was clearly commissioned to see how today’s art historical theorizing might reconsider Hilton’s art. Like Robert Rosenblum before her, with artists such as Rothko, Hauswald suggests some echoing of the pictorial schemata of the German Romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich (1784–1840) in Hilton’s abstraction. (The fact that Friedrich’s work was not on the British artistic ‘radar screen’ before the 1970s makes such a case deeply problematic.)

Hauswald then suggests correspondences with a range of early abstract artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Poliakoff. Of course one can relate Hilton’s work (especially in his 1953-4 phase) to earlier abstraction’s utopianism, as Hauswald says, but why did such utopianism become undermined and how did Hilton respond to its problematizing, we might ask?

We end with nods to the fashionable idea of cultural identity, with the suggestion that Hilton’s work was a hybrid of a specifically British and more generally European cultural identity, in contradistinction to the ethos of American Abstract Expressionism. There is an unresolved tension in Hauswald’s essay, however, between her claim that Hilton’s practice articulated a clear European cultural identity and her locating him within a longer and broader history of Romanticism. After all, Romanticism represents the broad cultural matrix of modern art as a whole. It transcends regional identity in its aspirations and produces as cultural progeny a concern for the abstract expression of authentic feelings and spiritual yearnings, both in America and Europe.

Roger Hilton: Swinging Out into the Void by Andrew Lambirth, Luke Elwes and Anett Hauswald is published by Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 2008. 72 pp. 42 colour and 4 mono illus, £12.95. ISBN 978-1-904561-29-3