Ivon Hitchens was a landscape painter known for colourful, abstract views of the countryside surrounding his home in Sussex.
He represented Britain in the 1956 Venice Biennale, and a major retrospective of his work was presented at the Tate in 1963. In the 1920s and ’30s, Hitchens was part of a circle of avant-garde artists in London that included Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Paul Nash.
He exhibited with the abstractionist group the Seven and Five Society and the London Group, whose annual exhibitions promoted contemporary British artists. While he participated in the avant-garde movement in Britain, he also found inspiration in the modernist still lifes and interiors of French painters like Paul Cèzanne, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque.
Hitchens’s London studio was damaged by bombing during World War II; he retreated to Sussex, where he spent the next 40 years producing lively panoramic landscapes in vivid colour.
