But he also worked long hours in the library of the British Museum. Tim embraced the hard-drinking bohemian world of a decaying Fitzrovia: the Museum Tavern (unofficial office of Studio International), the Plough, the Coach and Horses, the French, Bradley’s Spanish Bar, and many others besides. He could be terrifyingly rude and frightening to PRs, and thought the Turner prize “a charade”. He despised video and had little time for the Young British Artists. His own taste embraced early Picasso, abstract expressionism and its successors, and the abstract sculpture coming from Caro and the St Martin’s sculpture department. His critical mentor was the American Clement Greenberg, “Uncle Clem”, with whom he drank vodka in New York and London, and whose Art and Culture (1961) he thought “the best single work of modern art criticism”. He claimed to have a photographic memory for paintings. He wrote introductory essays for artist catalogues and worked on shows for the British Council. He became close friends with many artists, including Gillian Ayres, Terry Atkinson, Michael Bennett, Anthony Caro, Barrie Cook, Barry Flanagan, John McLean, Ronnie Rees and John Walker. The 60s and 70s were what he called “the anarchic golden age of British art schools”, and he enjoyed them to the full. He loved the talk in art schools and was an inspiring teacher, because he believed artists learned by doing. After two years he became a freelance critic, and taught in art schools, principally Birmingham, Norwich and St Martin’s in London. The director, Anthony Blunt, set him and a fellow postgraduate, Anita Brookner, to teach a course on art criticism, Tim teaching the English tradition, Brookner the French. He was loud and happy and shabby and vivid, and – impersonal.”įrom Oxford, Tim went on to the then small Courtauld Institute in London to begin a PhD. But he also knew about model villages, how to play bar billiards, classic French cooking, the early history of Aston Villa, Soviet songs, the history of witchcraft. He knew about the history of art and about paintings, which were his great passion. He conducted it in pubs, walking the streets, in wonderful letters packed and bursting with knowledge and ideas. Towards the end of his time at Oxford he formed a close relationship (they had the honeymoon, but not the marriage) with the future journalist Nuala O’Faolain, who wrote of him: “From the moment I met him I enrolled in his one-person university. He had inherited his father’s taste for good drink and good food, learning French with communist family friends in Paris, and he did little academic work, though he fed his mind. For a period he worked in a Typhoo Tea factory, and hoped to go to art school, but he went to his father’s Oxford college, Balliol, where he studied English (1961-64). He was sent to school at Tettenhall college in Wolverhampton, then to Aston Technical College (now Birmingham City University), both of which he disliked, but he developed an intense habit of reading. His parents divorced in 1951, and Tim was taken into care by Birmingham council. View image in fullscreen Tim Hilton was tasked by Anthony Blunt of the Courtauld Institute with teaching the English tradition of art criticism Anita Brookner taught the French. His escape was serious cycling, for which he had talent, and it was an elderly member of the free-wheeling Clarion cycling club who first told him about Ruskin. It gave Tim a horror of formal meetings that persisted throughout his life. He and Margaret left the party in 1956, but until then had been organisers of weekly meetings that their son – known as Timoshenko after a Red Army marshal rather than by his given name, John – was obliged to attend. Rodney was a founder member of the Communist Party Historians Group, which contributed to the split in the British Communist party following Stalin’s death in 1953. Tim’s contrariness stemmed from his childhood as the only son of Margaret (nee Palmer) and Rodney Hilton, communists who had met at Oxford in the 30s and became academics at the University of Birmingham, the city where Tim was born. There was a good spell as Alistair Horne fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford (1976-77), but also cold winters in holiday accommodation in Bembridge, Isle of Wight, where the most important Ruskin archive was then kept. He went through considerable privations to achieve this. Tim’s starting point was that the 39 volumes of the library edition of Ruskin’s works were “incomplete and often intentionally misleading”, and this meant starting again.
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