Hilton, Roger
Roger Hilton was born in London in 1911 and according to his parents’ wish was going to follow an academic career or in his father’s steps as a doctor. It was not till he failed his Oxford entrance exam that his mother, a Slade graduate who taught her children to draw and paint, encouraged Roger to follow her footsteps and to take a course in the Slade School of Art.
After finishing his first two years Roger left for Paris in Autumn 1931 and spent ten months at the Academie Ranson where he experimented with Cubism under the tutelage and influence of Roger Bissière (1886-1964) who made a lasting impression on him and admired the style of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Hilton returned to the Slade after that and studied there from 1934 to 1936. His first solo exhibition took place at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1936 when he was praised by Anthony Blunt (1907-1983) for his realistic paintings and portraits in the Left Review. His works were noted by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and Duncan Grant (1885-1978), the members of the Bloomsbury Group, and were accepted into the ‘Coronation Exhibition’ at Agnew in Summer 1937 and various shows by the London Group in the 1930s.
When the Second World War started in 1939 Roger Hilton volunteered for the commandos and was captured by the Germans becoming a POW from 1942 to 1945. It took around 3 years for him from his return home in 1946 to start building his career as a professional artist. Hilton was influenced by the art of Constant (1920 – 2005) and Cobra group and moved out of figuration into Tachisme owing deeply to Alfred Manessier (1911-1993) whose paintings he saw at the number of ‘L’Ecole de Paris’ shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and the Royal Academy in London. Critics of the time were doubting the fate of abstraction and Constructivism but were seduced by Roger’s painterly manner and colourism. In 1949 Hilton exhibited at the Salon des Independants in Paris. His works were included in the Artist’s International Association exhibition in London in 1950 and ‘Abstract Paintings, Sculpture, Mobiles’ in 1951 where he met Ben Nicholson (1884-1982) and Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) among the others and his paintings gained recognition. His success resulted in the collector Howard Bliss showing Hilton’s paintings at the Tate Gallery at the show ‘Seventeen Collectors’.
By that time Roger’s work continued to change from its emphasis on brushwork towards his choice of colour after he visited Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and saw works by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1979-1935). Hilton also developed the taste to simplify the layout of his paintings with coloured forms extending beyond the surface of the canvas away from the central axis. As he wrote in ‘Nine Abstract Artists’ in 1954: ’I like my colour dynamic and strongly contrasted forms….I have moved away from spatial pictures … to space-creating pictures’. At the same time, he admitted to being tired of non-figuration and decided to introduce human elements into his forms too. Hilton had several one-man shows in commercial galleries in the 1950s. His style finally fully matured and his fame grew to culminate in his first ‘Roger Hilton: Paintings 1953-1957’ retrospective exhibition at the ICA in London in March 1958.
The 1960s saw Hilton increasing his contacts with St Ives school of British abstract artists through his friend Patrick Heron (1920-1999 ) while developing his unique and independent style. He was at the height of his career and was selected to represent Britain at XXXII Venice Biennale where he was awarded UNESCO prize and received the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968. In March 1974 a retrospective ‘Roger Hilton: Paintings and Drawings 1931-1973’ was opened at Serpentine Gallery in London celebrating forty years of his career as an artist. His major posthumous retrospectives were held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1993 and Tate St Ives in 2006.
