Abstract with Target

In the catalogue for the 1961 exhibition at Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, Roger Hilton wrote that, 'Abstraction in itself is nothing. It is only a step towards a new sort of figuration, that is, one which is more true. However, beautiful they may be, one can no longer depict women as Titian did. Renoir in his last pictures had already greatly modified her shape. Today one sees people who are changing abstraction into landscape (the easiest to do). For an abstract painter there are two ways out or on: he must give up painting and take to architecture, or he must reinvent figuration' (see exhibition catalogue, Roger Hilton: Paintings and drawings 1931-1973, London, Arts Council, Serpentine Gallery, 1974, p. 3).