British Modernism:

Ivon Hitchens and Kenneth Armitage

Ivon Hitchens (British, 1893-1979)

Remembering Robert Frost's

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 1940

Oil on canvas, 16 H. x 29 W. inches

When Hitchens' London house was bombed in 1940 during World War II, he moved to the countryside of Sussex and began a years-long series of woodland scenes. He and his family stayed in the same rural area for the next forty years where he continued to find inspiration from the woods around him. This work was one of the first he completed after escaping the city.

Hitchens is particularly well-known for panoramic landscape paintings created from blocks of color and for his meditations on the ponds, birch groves and bracken around his Sussex home. He wrote that his new “more settled life, with permanent roots in this soil, has led to a deeper search for the more abstract elements of a given subject.”

In 1922, he joined The Seven and Five Society, a group of seven painters and five sculptors, including Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, who embraced modernism and abstraction in the 1920s. In 1935 the group held the first all abstract exhibition in Britain at the Zwemmer Gallery in London.

Kenneth Armitage, CBE, RA (British, 1916-2002)

Model for a Large Work, c. 1963

Bronze, natural patina

6 ½ H. x 16 W. x 4 D. inches

Like Ivon Hitchens, Kenneth Armitage was a leading artist in the world of British abstraction. He followed in the footsteps of other modernist Yorkshire sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Armitage drew inspiration from his local landscape, much like Hitchens did in Sussex, and nature played an important part in his early stylistic evolution.

After his first one-man show in 1952 at Gimpel Fils, in London, Armitage’s reputation quickly gathered momentum, and he showed regularly at galleries in London and New York. In 1960 he was commissioned by Baron Philippe de Rothschild to create a sculpture for the central façade of Château Mouton Rothschild in Bordeaux. Rothschild’s patronage of avant-garde artists was well-established, and annual commissions were given to artists such as Miró, Moore, Picasso and Chagall.

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