John Piper

By Darren Pih

Published to accompany the John Piper exhibition at the Tate Liverpool and written by its curator, this book presents a comprehensive examination of the English artist’s role as champion of modernism in Britain.

John Piper (1903–1992) is renowned for his extraordinarily diverse practice that embraced landscape, architectural and abstract compositions, as well as his theatre and stage sets for Benjamin Britten and his stained-glass windows. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool is the first to examine Piper's role in European modernism, presenting major works by Piper alongside selected works by artists including Jean Hélion and Alexander Calder.

The book contains works by Piper including painting, relief, collage and photography and also presents comparative works and information compiling over 70 images. The book is divided into the following sections:

1. Introduction

2. Early Paintings & Drawings

3. Going Abstract

4. Picturesque Landscapes & War Artist

5. The Postwar Landscape

Accompanying the exhibition, this book offers an innovative look at the work of an incredibly versatile artist, evidencing how Piper’s work fused the creation of the European avant-garde with a powerful sensitivity to Britain and its history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911595861

Darren Pih

Darren Pih is the Exhibitions and Displays Curator at Tate Liverpool, where he has worked since 2005. Darren has published numerous essays for exhibition catalogues and online. Darren lives in Liverpool.

Book preview

Illustration

JOHN PIPER

illustration

Avebury, or Archaeological Wiltshire 1936–7, ink, watercolour and gouache with collage on paper 41.2 × 53; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Purchased 1964

Illustrationillustration

Photograph of John Piper in Patrick Reyntiens’s studio by Elsbeth Juda, c.1960–1

CONTENTS

Introduction

Early Paintings & Drawings

Going Abstract

Picturesque Landscapes & War Artist

The Postwar Landscape

List of Artworks

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

John Egerton Christmas Piper was born in Epsom in Surrey on 13 December 1903, the youngest of three sons in a cultured and comfortably well-off family. His ancestral background and upbringing were essentially rural. During his years studying at the Royal College of Art in London in 1928–9, his home was a cottage in the village of Betchworth in Surrey and from the beginning of his career he made works depicting landscapes, ruined or historic buildings in both rural and urban settings, and specific places he found on his native coastline. He was especially known for paintings of English churches and monuments and had a life-long devotion to studying their history and appearance.

On leaving the Royal College before graduating, Piper also earned a reputation as an arts, literary and theatre critic. His range of writing is notable for its open-handedness and egalitarianism, demonstrating his capacity to find value in things as they came without prejudice. His writings embraced not just the visual arts, but subjects including opera, vernacular architecture, classical music and even texts on English folk dancing. Over a four-year period in the early 1930s, he educated himself in modernism while developing the techniques to emerge as one of the most avant-garde artists of his generation.

So Piper was a paradox – an antiquarian with a polymath’s interest in medieval history and antiquity, yet a major proponent of international abstract art in Britain, especially during the mid-1930s. His paintings, even at their most abstract and apparently disassociated from the visible world, drew inspiration from the crisp planes of colour he admired in medieval stained-glass windows. He studied and wrote about early English stone carving and regarded this as a forebear of the abstract art of the 1930s. Piper’s profound visual sensitivity to his native landscape and knowledge of its history was the foundation stone of his artistic imagination. Indeed, his knowledge was so extensive that he compiled and edited many of the Shell Guides to the British counties.

Piper was an aesthete and loved music, especially classical, modern and jazz. As a young man, he had seen the Diaghilev ballets in London and after 1938 designed theatre sets for ballet and opera for Stephen Spender, Benjamin Britten and John Cranko and others; in some ways, the impact of stage-pictures can be seen in his 1930s collages, especially those using a compositional device of curtains that are drawn back to reveal a coastal scene to the viewer. Piper also had a fine eye for typography and graphics and after the war he designed book covers as well as tapestries and fabrics; he also made ceramics.

The variety and quality of Piper’s artistic output is astonishing and too broad to be adequately encompassed within a single publication. Perhaps his crowning artistic achievement was his work as a designer of stained glass. The collaborations from 1953 onwards with the artisan glassmaker Patrick Reyntiens – often for churches that had been destroyed or damaged during the Blitz – helped to constitute a wholesale revival of a heritage craft in the postwar period.

Piper’s shift into abstract art can be read against the backdrop of a wider movement to naturalise continental modernism within a British context, epitomised by Paul Nash’s forming of the short-lived Unit One group in 1933. That year, Ben Nicholson became aware of Piper’s recent work as well as his article on Edward Wadsworth, published in Apollo magazine.1 Shortly afterwards, Piper was elected to the Seven and Five Society. Initially a traditional exhibiting group founded in 1919, it underwent a radical and progressive transformation in the 1930s under the leadership of Nicholson to become the abstract-constructivist wing of British art. Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth became members in 1932 and Piper fully embraced the group’s ‘abstract only’ mandate in 1934. Without doubt, his membership of the group contributed to his emerging prominence as an artist.

At the same time, Piper was helping to realize the ambitions of Myfanwy Evans, his partner and future wife, to launch and edit AXIS. Published between 1935 and 1937, it was the first magazine in Britain devoted to international abstract art. However, while describing abstract art as a ‘religion’ in a letter to Decoration magazine in March 1936, Piper never responded to its mystique. He came to regard abstract art as an exercise, essentially useful but inadequate in content and unsuited to recording and understanding landscape and architecture.

A key text marking his shift away from abstraction is his 1937 essay ‘Lost, A Valuable Object’, in which he envisages a British art at once modern and ancient. In the text, Piper calls for a return to ‘the object’ in art that he believed had been destroyed by the dematerialising effect of abstraction. He writes:

One thing is certain about all activities since cubism: artists everywhere have done their best to find something to replace the object that cubism destroyed. They have visited museums, and skidded back through the centuries, across whole continents and civilisations in their search . . . In this country, for instance, we find Paul Nash identifying all nature with a Bronze Age standing stone, and Ben Nicholson even assisting at world-creation. Henry Moore has landed us back in the stomach of pre-history.2

Yet this wasn’t a return to representation or the object in art per se, but rather a return to the culturally meaningful object presented in its proper context. It could describe a building or a monument, or a tree standing in a field, sited in its natural landscape, yet mediated by a shared sense of history. Like Paul Nash and Henry Moore, Piper found in objects such as prehistoric carvings a vocabulary of form that was abstract, yet spoke of the human rituals and needs in the modern era.

Piper did not believe art had begun afresh with the advent of post-impressionism in 1910 but thought that British art needed regenerating. To achieve this, Piper sought inspiration from the past while also looking to the artistic firmament of the Parisian avant-garde. For example, in Picasso’s work Piper saw a new way of depicting the visible world that did not discount his own sensitivity to the British landscape and its history. In a sense, he understood the work of Picasso as inscribing the heritage of the future. In 1929, for example, he found equivalence between the National Trust’s preservation of a grove of beech trees with the notion of a museum preserving a Picasso painting.3 Abstract art therefore was a means of reinvigorating his approach to landscape painting and traditional subjects, enabling him to see the world afresh.

From around 1939, Piper helped to effect a reorientation towards a native genealogy of art and architecture. It