Roger Hilton
Born – Northwood, England 1911
Died – St Just, England 1975
Roger Hilton’s declared goal was to “reinvent figuration”. He attempts to do so have established his significant contribution to the development of post-war painting in Britain. Hilton trained at the Slade School of Art in London. During the 1930s he attended the Academic Ranson in Paris, where he began to absorb the influence of progressive artistic ideas. Hilton served in the Commandos during the war. He was captured and held prisoner until 1945. By 1950 he had returned to Paris and the influence of the painters of the Paris School was reinforced by his study of Mondrian’s work in Amsterdam and The Hague. He had travelled there with Constant Nieuwenhuys, a painter of the CoBra group whom Hilton referred to as a “humanized Mondrian”. Hilton’s own abstract, “neo-plastic” paintings became more severe, forceful compositions of line produced from a reductive palette. Impressed by his first visit to St Ives in 1956, he rented a studio at Newlyn, and settled in Cornwall in 1965. He had announced that, “Abstraction in itself is nothing”, and his work began orienting toward colourful figuration, beginning with the landscape and culminating in the vitality of recognizable subjects such as the dancing woman of Oi, Yoi, Yoi.
Masterpieces:
- Large Orange, Newlyn, June 1959
- March 1961
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About roger hilton
Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought
Andrew Lambirth
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Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts
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The Age of the Avant-Garde: 1956-1972
Hilton Kramer
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