Still Life with Azaleas

This early flower painting, dating from Hitchens’ London years, has a hard-edge definition of form not found in his later work. The forms are clearly articulated but also flattened, layered and overlapping, the space tilted up to the picture plane, in a typically post-cubist manner which emphasises structural analysis. The colour is carefully arranged in rich contrasts, but does not yet have the spontaneous brushing and soft edges of the later flower pictures. It is, however, a vigorous and innovative composition, a key early work full of formal experiment despite the essentially representational quality of the imagery. Hitchens wrote later: ‘I should like things to fall into place with so clear a notation that the spectator's eye and “aesthetic ear” shall receive a clear message, a clear tune. Every part should be an inevitable part of the whole. I seek to recreate the truth of nature by making my own song about it (in paint).’

A.L.