Obituaries Anthony Hill 1930–2020 It must have been in the late 1970s that I happened to describe Anthony Hill as an ‘old master’, in a conversation with Alan Bowness. The notion appeared strange to my interlocutor. But I meant to contrast him with the artists of a younger generation in whose company he was exhibiting in ‘Constructive Context’, the Arts Council travelling exhibition of 1978–79 which I curated. By then it was more than a quarter of a century since Anthony had emerged as easily the youngest member of the small group of artists comprising Victor Pasmore (b1908), Kenneth Martin (b1905) and Mary Martin (b1907) which reset the direction of British abstract art in the early 1950s. Pasmore later acknowledged the role of the ‘structurist’ reliefs and theoretical writings of the American Charles Biederman in ‘re-orientating the cubist constructive outlook’, but it was Hill, in particular, who contributed to the postwar renewal of the discourse of geometrical abstraction through a series of articles as well as by participating in new international forums like Structure, the Dutch artist Joost Baljeu’s magazine. The culmination of this process came in 1968, when Faber published Hill’s anthology of texts entitled DATA (Directions in Art, Theory and Aesthetics). The contributors were international and interdisciplinary. DATA struck a new note compared with Faber’s CIRCLE anthology of 1937, which had been edited by Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Leslie Martin. In my review for the TLS on 6 February 1969, I pointed out the shi s in emphasis. DATA’s exploratory character suited the year when the Prague Spring was suppressed by Russian intervention and the May 1968 events in Paris heralded a new phase in politics.

The English abstract artists of the 1950s had followed different paths. Both Pasmore and Kenneth Martin continued to use colour, and o en painted in oils. A er experimenting with collage, Hill developed his own distinctive mode through fabricating relief constructions, made solely from metal and plastic components. Vladimir Tatlin’s

Anthony Hill, Prime Rhythms, 1958–62 (le ), and Prime Rhythms, 1960, installation view, Hayward Gallery retrospective, 1983. Hill Estate, DACS, 2020

‘counter-reliefs’ were a noteworthy precedent, but Hill’s work did not share the ideology of the Russian artist’s ‘material syntax’. Biederman’s reliefs were another point of reference, but Hill questioned his insistence that the relief should bear a relationship to the visible structures of the natural world. Although Hill did not envisage the development of his own work as linear, there was a change of direction in the 1970s, when he began to represent algorithmic procedures in shallow relief, challenging the viewer through the impression that the geometric sequences were produced by a machine. In this decade, he also developed a parallel career as honorary research fellow in the Mathematics department of University College London. The most extensive showing of his work was in Summer 1983 when the Arts Council mounted a retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. The catalogue remains an eloquent testimony to the consistent quality of his work, but the lengthy list of ‘errata’ that accompanies it suggests that there were dif iculties in the planning!

As a person, Hill was something of a conundrum. A self-proclaimed ‘solipsist’, he corresponded with Marcel Duchamp, but admitted that he did not regret getting to know him better. He was af licted with deafness, and, unlike the Martins who had succeeded in establishing a new generation of English constructive artists, he inspired few students. One poignant exception would be the tragically short-lived Tom Edmonds, who studied with him at Chelsea around 1968, and whose beautiful glass constructions relating to concrete poetry have been rediscovered in a recent exhibition. I myself took a divergent path as a critic when I became involved around 1970 with the Systems group of constructive artists, from which Hill stood somewhat apart. When Art Monthly commissioned me in 1983 to interview him, I was sent a list compiled by Anthony himself of the questions that I was to ask – and embarrassingly mentioned the fact to a mutual acquaintance. But he was a genial host in his lat on Charlotte Street not far from Bertorelli’s, which perpetuated the atmosphere of London’s Bohemian Fitzrovia. On one visit there, I noticed there that he had adapted the lettering on the spine of Constructive Concepts, a weighty study by the Swiss art historian Willy Rotzler, to read SILLY ROT. Following the example of Theo van Doesburg, the editor of De Stijl, he invented a dadaist ‘alter ego’ to offset his constructivist persona. ‘Rem Doxford’ (contracted eventually to RED0) le the stamp of this alternative name on his envelopes, and was pleased to sign off letters with a caricature of his bespectacled pro ile. Stephen Bann

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Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021