David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Jenkins, David Fraser, and Spalding, Frances
Jenkins, David Fraser, and Spalding, Frances. 2003. John Piper in
the 1930s: Abstraction on the Beach. London: Merrell and Dulwich Picture
Gallery. Dulwich
Picture Gallery, 1 April–22 June 2003.
‘
Beyond the map of luxury’, The Times Literary Supplement, 30 May 2003,
p. 18.
Abstraction was an appealing concept to many British artists between the World
Wars, but it was a troubling one too. What exactly was abstraction? The landscape
painter and critic Paul Nash admitted in 1935 that he found it a ‘bewildering
expression’, though in the early part of the decade he had experimented
quite vigorously with non-representational techniques of shape, form and colour.
Whilst abstraction as a concept causes no such bewilderment today, another
unexpected exponent was John Piper. Prior to this excellent centenary exhibition
at the Dulwich Picture Gallery I had known Piper almost exclusively for his
stained-glass windows and his highly individual and Romantic portraits of English
country houses, gardens and churches. Indeed, when Evelyn Waugh met Piper during
the Second World War, he provided him with part of the inspiration for his
character Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, who on leaving Oxford becomes
a successful architectural painter. ‘I don’t much admire Piper’s
work,’ Waugh told John Betjeman, ‘but know no one else.’
Only the last three or four paintings in this exhibition are of this Piper, the
later Piper who embraced his Englishness, his love of architecture and his childhood
fascination with Turner. Yet there is something about these later paintings which
makes it clear why the traditional-minded Waugh disliked them. In a famous anecdote,
King George VI is said to have remarked after seeing the artist’s swirling,
dramatic watercolours of Windsor Castle in 1942, ‘Very poor weather you
seem to have had, Mr Piper.’
Personally, I love these exaggerated, exciting interpretations of buildings and
landscapes — and in fact, there is much about the British climate in them.
They are Romantic in a dark, brooding, northern European way, and they ache with
the tradition of a British past. In his fascinating little book British Romantic
Art, published in 1942 during the midst of a war that so threatened Britain’s
historical environment, Piper wrote: ‘As a race we have always been conscious
of the soft atmosphere and the changeable climate of our sea-washed country,
where the air is never quite free from mist, where the light of the sun is more
often pale and pearly than it is fiery. This atmosphere has sunk into our souls.
It has affected our art as it affects our life.’
This is what this exhibition provides us with: an understanding of how Piper
the man and Piper the artist reached the point of his wartime and post-war work,
and how these works burst forth from his experiments with abstraction. It is
a fascinating journey. For, given his love of the historic and the Romantic,
Piper’s involvement with abstraction — such a seemingly modern movement,
so redolent of Picasso, Braque, Mondrian — at first seems curious, or at
least anomalous. What we discover here is how and why his interest in the style
developed; how it influenced his later, more famous works; how he filtered it
through his own idiosyncratic vision and interests, and how he produced at the
same time some rather impressive works of abstract art along the way.
Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1903, and he quickly showed an almost obsessive
fascination with history — he claimed that by the age of fourteen he had
explored every church in Surrey, and at fifteen became secretary of the local
branch of the county’s archaeological society. After completing school,
however, he was obliged to join his father’s law firm, a career prospect
he hated. In 1925 and 1926 he saw the Ballets Russes at the Coliseum, and Derain’s
drop curtain for Boutique Fantastique and Picasso’s curtain and décor
for The Three Cornered Hat. He became a huge fan of Picasso, and shortly afterwards
met Braque.
When his father died in 1927 he had no qualms about leaving the law immediately.
He studied at Richmond School of Art and then, for a little over a year, at the
Royal College of Art. By 1931 he was already exhibiting regularly, and frequenting
Zwemmer’s art bookshop in Charing Cross Road to browse through the books
and journals, keeping abreast of developments on the continent through the pages
of the French magazine Cahiers d’Art.
Though a late starter, he was quickly catching up with his younger contemporaries,
and attracting the attention of older artists. In 1933 Ben Nicholson invited
him to join the increasingly abstract 7 & 5 Society, whose numbers included
Barbara Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens, David Jones, Henry Moore and Winifred Nicholson.
As the first room of this Dulwich exhibition shows, in 1933 Piper had been experimenting
with a series of seaside still-lifes:
assortments of objects (bottles, jugs,
shells, books) placed on windowsills with views beyond to boats, quays and harbour
buildings, cleverly mixing in oil paint with collage techniques (paper doilies,
newsprint, tobacco packets) copied from Picasso, Braque and Dada. A growing interest
in the rhythm and relationship of objects is witnessed in beach scenes such as
Foreshore with Boats, South Coast (private collection, 1933) and Four Nudes on
a Beach Lighthouse (private collection, c.1933). Though the debt to his continental
heroes is clear, they are nevertheless attractive and exciting works.
It has to be said here, however, that the subtitle to the exhibition (‘Abstraction
on the Beach’) is slightly disingenuous: there were many strings to Piper’s
artistic bow in the 1930s. The beach, the seaside, was quite clearly one of them,
and one of the most important. But — as the exhibition acknowledges — architecture,
sculpture and stained glass all also provided major inspirations. He could write
of making a drawing in 1929 of a medieval stained-glass window from Salisbury
Cathedral: ‘On the whole I learnt more about using colours doing this copy
than I have ever learnt before or since.’
But it was a visit to Paris in the summer of 1934 that inspired the next step
in Piper’s development, and his movement to complete abstraction. He had
seen there the wire sculptures of Alexander Calder and César Domela’s
reliefs, and when Nicholson demanded that all submissions to the 7 & 5’s
next exhibition should be abstract, Piper responded with aplomb. Using doweling
rods, sandpaper and enamel paints his constructions are some of the most surprising
and colourful pieces in the exhibition. There is a freshness and immediacy to
them, and they easily rival the contemporaneous abstract works of Nicholson and,
even, Mondrian. The critic Hugh Gordon Porteus wrote at the time that these ‘alarmingly
precise and complex’ constructions resembled ‘nightmare relief maps
such as a neat and gifted electrician might improvise in his sleep.’ Frances
Spalding in her introduction to the accompanying catalogue argues that Piper’s
distinct abstract language of form, line and colour may have derived from ‘nautical
objects, in the shapes and colours of buoys, staysails, masts and hulls of boats.’
This suggestion is certainly compelling, and Piper kept his eyes open for all
sorts of possible influences. By the mid-1930s Piper and his future wife, Myfanwy
Evans, who edited the abstract art journal AXIS, were travelling England, visiting
churches and taking photographs of early English sculpture. Piper believed that ‘the
purely non-figurative artists of some early Northumbrian and Cornish crosses
were the forbears of the pure abstractionists of to-day. There were also early
reactions against recognized forms, and obvious expressions of the subconscious,
that find a contemporary parallel in surrealism. Many a Picasso-like profile
is to be found on twelfth-century fonts and capitals.’ And in an article
for the final edition of AXIS in the winter of 1937, he examined the influence
of air photography and prehistoric archaeology on changing our sense of ‘spaces
and forms and vistas’. Silbury Hill in Wiltshire as depicted by William
Stukeley, the ‘eighteenth-century antiquary genius’, becomes an exercise
in size and shape and description: ‘to jump, run, walk, or struggle up
each slope with Stukeley in his drawing is as real and as sharp an experience
as to take a journey round a wineglass with Picasso.’
By the late ‘30s it becomes clear that abstraction was not to be the way
ahead for Piper. Nevertheless, like his constructions of 1934, the abstract paintings
and ‘forms’ of the period 1935 to 1938, and in particular the seaside
collages of 1936 and 1937, with their boats and cliffs and lighthouses, are wonderfully
vibrant, colourful and alive. But though increasingly recognized as one of the
foremost abstract artists at work in Britain, these works were barely selling.
By July 1938 he felt ‘Abstraction is a luxury’. He had become impatient
with the abstractionists’ demands for clean lines and purity of expression.
For Piper, ‘Pure abstraction is undernourished. It should at least be allowed
to feed on a bare beach with tins and broken bottles.’ There had to be
some room for realism. In 1943 he told Paul Nash, ‘After an abstract period
what a release one feels!’ Nature and the historical landscape ‘are
seen with such new intensity!’ Abstracted till they became like a Ben Nicholson,
these views could be hung in a Cork Street gallery, ‘but not hung against
one’s heart.’
The journey completed, we have travelled ten short years across the long life
of Piper — he only died in 1992. It is a rare opportunity to see such a
relatively short period in such detail, and to witness in it so much change and
development. With many of the works coming from private collections, this exhibition
offers a valuable reassessment of Piper’s career and his fascinating mind.
And with the accompanying exhibition of Shell tourist posters commissioned from
various of Piper’s contemporaries, it is an absorbing step into the art
world of 1930s England.
©
David Boyd Haycock