Fresh and wild

Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the finest draughtsmen of the nude in the postwar period and his paintings more often than not make close reference to the human body. He was the most European artist of his generation and was the last major painter not to be influenced by the new wave of Americans whose work was flooding Britain. Hilton is a solitary figure in many ways, whose best painting easily stands comparison with such figures as Guston and de Kooning, and fits into the European context of Dubuffet and Tapies. But he was also a bit of a wild man, given to outrageous behaviour and intemperance, and stories of his rudeness and transgressions have tended to obscure his very real artistic achievement.