December 1960

Roger Hilton (1911-75) was a late developer, and none of his pre-war work gives any indication that in the mid-1950s he would become one of England’s most radical and inventive abstract painters. A Francophile of broadly European sensibility, Hilton studied at the Slade and in Paris, but didn’t begin to discover his own voice until the 1940s, evolving his own version of the tachism of Serge Poliakoff crossed with the Neo-plasticism of Constant Nieuwenhuys. His progress through the 1950s was remarkably swift and assured as he delved deeper into the language of organic lyrical abstraction, arriving finally at the kind of major and highly original painterly statement of December 1960.

This is a painting about paint, not narrative or anecdote, and as such must be assessed formally and aesthetically. The ochre, part of the inverted cone of grey, and the white, are laid on boldly with broad buttery sweeps, probably with a palette knife, in a seemingly simple compositional arrangement which actually embodies great subtlety. Hilton plays fast and loose with juxtaposition and layering, the whole painting giving the impression of having been dashed off in one inspired session. Actually his practice was to paint quickly, in short bursts, and to ponder long. The look of spontaneity is hard-won, the marks and dispositions of the paint well-worked. Hilton arrived at the apparently effortless certainty of his gesture by extensive pre-meditation, and a limbering-up process of drawing. It was his habit at this period to loosen the wrist (and the mind) with a sheaf of drawings carried out on the breakfast table every morning before leaving home for the studio. The unfeigned spontaneity of the drawings was then (with luck) carried through into the paintings, as it is triumphantly in December 1960.

In fact, Hilton’s mature style intentionally brought the notion of the sketch to the finished picture, thus generating a new immediacy in the work. Charcoal drawing played a crucial role in Hilton’s paintings from about 1956 onwards, so much so that his medium is really a dual one: oil and charcoal. In this work the charcoal drawing is mostly reserved to the lower portion of the canvas, specifically at the bottom left and the bottom right. But there are traces elsewhere, for Hilton’s procedure was essentially one of layering and letting the previous marks and colours come through from underneath in hints and accents. The complexity of the layering belies the immediacy of the image: white paint overlays charcoal, grey overlays white, ochre overlays grey. Red bleeds through the area of brushily-worked black at the right edge. All these colour areas and quantities are exquisitely controlled while giving the appearance of great naturalness.

The shapes are intriguing. Although the basic grammar of the painting is composed of blocks and wedges, the various forms have an organic presence far from any geometric prototype. The painting’s particular dynamic is based upon the grey cone which links the painterly activity at the top to what is happening at the bottom, while providing a sense of space and movement. This is also enhanced by the charcoal ‘legs’ beneath the cone, and the additional one below the black area on the right. Any slight figurative suggestions in so resolutely abstract an image are located around this area of the painting. December 1960 comes from the best period of Hilton’s work, when his greatest achievements in oil paint were made and he was consolidating his reputation, having been taken up by the dealer Leslie Waddington in 1959. In 1963 he won first prize at the John Moores exhibition, and in 1964 he won the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale. In 1960, Hilton’s career was at its height.

We are very grateful to Andrew Lambirth for preparing this catalogue entry. Andrew Lambirth is author of Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought (2007), and co-curator of Roger Hilton: Swinging out into the Void, held at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2008.