Roger Hilton: Kicking Against The Pricks

About

Beaux Arts presents an exhibition of works that span the career of one of the pioneers of British abstract art, Roger Hilton (1911-75). The show takes its title from the artist's alcohol-fuelled ‘Night Letters', the nocturnal jottings he wrote when illness confined him to bed in the early 1970s. The full quote reads: ‘It is useless to kick against the pricks, said St Paul. I don't believe it. One has to kick and go on kicking.' Hilton spent his life kicking. His ability to misbehave in public became legendary, earning him the sobriquet ‘Hilton the hellraiser', but it severely tested his personal relations and it certainly did not help his career. On one occasion a dinner to celebrate his winning of the main prize at the 1963 John Moores Exhibition ended in scandal when one of the guests keeled over and died following an exchange with Hilton. ‘Artist's behaviour kills Alderman' ran the headlines. But it's this very unpredictability that made Hilton, according to supporter Alan Bowness, ‘one of the most original of English painters'. The sense of a life lived spontaneously — on the edge — infuses his work; his charcoal lines crackle with energy, improvised shapes reach for inner truths and disorder threatens to overwhelm the canvas. ‘An artist is like an aviator', wrote Hilton, ‘At any minute there might be a disaster.' The idea of a painting failing to communicate a sense of vitality was for him ‘a dead picture'. Beaux Arts' show attempts to illustrate this strength. It includes oils, drawings and the late, often underrated, gouaches that poured from him in his declining years. The carefully chosen works chart Hilton's progression from the near-geometric abstraction of the early 1950s to the inventive, sensual dialogue between abstraction and figuration that marks the central period of his career and the playful humour of the gouaches. Each is a perfect illustration of the dictum he lived and painted by, that ‘Art, if it is anything, is a blood and death battle, into which you throw everything you've got.' It is hoped that with Hilton the enfant terrible laid to rest, Patrick Heron's prediction that he would one day be recognized as one of the best artists of his generation can finally be realized.