Ivon Hitchens

Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) is widely regarded as the outstanding English landscape painter of the twentieth century. Immediately recognisable by its daring yet subtle use of colour and brushmark to evoke the spirit of place, his work is to be found in public and private collections throughout the world. In this, the definitive study of Hitchens' life and work now issued in a new, revised edition, Peter Khoroche draws on the painter's published writings, correspondence and conversation to create a critical reappraisal of Hitchens' theory and practice. He surveys the entire oeuvre (still-lifes, flower pieces, nudes, interiors and large-scale murals besides the landscapes), a huge legacy of work spanning sixty years, and charts the journey from conventional beginnings to 'figurative abstraction'. A new selection of over 100 colour images provide a retrospective exhibition covering Hitchens' whole career. These illustrations, examples of his best and most characteristic painting in all genres, demonstrate the artist's outstanding talents and reinforce his standing as a key figure in the history of British art.

Explores the 'still life spirit' in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetryChallenges the conventional positioning of still life a 'minor' genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace StevensThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Czanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

“Richly rethinks one of art’s everlasting topics.” —Art & Auction Leading artists of the twenty-first century are reviving the still life, a genre that once was more associated with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Masters than with contemporary art. The audacious still lifes celebrated here challenge that historical supremacy and redefine what it means to be a work of nature morte (literally translated from the French: “dead nature”). Whether through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, or other media, contemporary artists have drawn on the centuries-old tradition to create works of conceptual vivacity, beauty, and emotional poignancy. Structured according to the classical categories of the still-life tradition—Flora, Food, House and Home, Fauna, and Death, each chapter explores how the timeless symbolic resonance of the memento mori—a reminder of death, change, and the passing of time—has been rediscovered for a new millennium. Among the artists represented are John Currin, Saara Ekström, Elmgreen & Dragset, Renata Hegyi, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Jeff Koons, McDermott & McGough, Beatriz Milhazes, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Cy Twombly.

Christopher Neves classic book is a journey into the imagination through the English landscape. How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? Painting, says Neve, is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis. What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time, for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, the spirit in the mass to David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters ideas on specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the garden.

"Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) is widely regarded as the outstanding English landscape painter of the twentieth century. Immediately recognisable by its daring yet subtle use of colour and brushmark to evoke the spirit of place, his work is to be found in public and private collections throughout the world." "In this, the definitive study of Hitchens' life and work now issued in a new, revised edition, Peter Khoroche draws on the painter's published writings, correspondence and conversation to create a critical reappraisal of Hitchens' theory and practice. He surveys the entire oeuvre (still-lifes, flower pieces, nudes, interiors and large-scale murals besides the landscapes), a huge legacy of work spanning sixty years, and charts the journey from conventional beginnings to 'figurative abstraction'." "A new selection of over 100 colour images provides a retrospective exhibition covering Hitchens' whole career. These illustrations, examples of his best and most characteristic painting in all genres, demonstrate the artist's outstanding talents and reinforce his standing as a key figure in the history of British art."--BOOK JACKET.

A major retrospective of the work of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), one of the most inventive and prolific of the British artists to come to prominence after the Second World War. Featuring around 150 works in a variety of media, the exhibition will explore the extraordinary versatility of Paolozzi's approach to making art and the central importance of collage as a working process within his career, not only in the traditional sense of paper collage, but also in terms of sculptural assemblage, printmaking and filmmaking