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. Although a more powerful and inventive painter than either of his friends and contemporaries Patrick Heron or Terry Frost, he is not as well known to the general public. Now that is set to change.

A substantial exhibition of Hilton’s work has just opened at Tate St Ives (until 21 January 2007). Featuring some 75 paintings and drawings, it gives a succinct and potent overview of Hilton’s career, though it is by no means a full retrospective. There isn’t really room: Tate St Ives is a difficult space in which to show paintings, having round walls, echoing the gasworks it replaced. The works inevitably get split up, and a sense of continuity is sometimes lost, as various single pictures are dotted about in odd places. (I didn’t even see the striking red and black ‘May 1968’ until my second visit, perhaps because it is hung over stairs.)