Looking for maturity

5 April 2012

When did John Piper die? In the sense that he departed this life, as they say, on 28 June 1992, at the age of 89, that should be the date on his tombstone, but in the sense of departing from the art world as we know it now, the date must be much earlier. Was it, perhaps, in 1987 when, in the Royal Academy's supposedly encyclopedic exhibition of 20th Century British Art, he was represented by only one painting, an immature and experimental early abstract of 1936, and not by the Neo-Romantic paintings for which he is best known and popularly loved? A long life's work ignored for a transitory "modern" experiment, Piper was justifiably wounded by the insult.

Was it in 1983, when the old Tate Gallery gave him a retrospective exhibition that implied a marked falling-off of eye and ability and the intellectual decline of second childhood? A retrospective exhibition is often valedictory.

Or was it as early as 1944, when Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, as editor of the largely enlightening books called Penguin Modern Painters, commissioned John Betjeman to write one on John Piper?

Most of these slim volumes were written by other artists or by art historians and theorists - Douglas Cooper on Klee, for example, and Clive Bell on Victor Pasmore - but for Piper, Clark chose the tum-te-tum versifier Betjeman. Was it that he saw Piper as nothing more than a tumtetum painter of kindred trivia?

With Betjeman, Clark shared a taste for girls of the ilk of Joan Hunter-Dunn, and of Piper, he wrote that when he first knew him the painter had, like Betjeman, "... already discovered the charm, both decorative and symbolic, of some neglected aspects of English building." Charming, decorative, symbolic and neglected - dangerous words, all of them, in the context of English art, seductive to the amateur; throw in the sleight-of-hand of repeated practice, the assured mannerism, the deft trick, the reliable devices of distorted perspective, high colour and dramatic lighting, and we have the essence of the mature work of John Piper, a maturity that endured, unmodified, for half a century.

Was Clark in some way responsible for the essential Piper? Did he, when in 1940, as chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, he commissioned Piper to record the effects of the war in Britain, confirm him in a particular imagery and style?

He gave much the same task to Graham Sutherland and both painters responded as though bomb damage on civilian targets was the inspiration for which they had been waiting for a decade.

Sutherland imposed a visionary response of his own and then expanded into other forms of menace, but Piper merely confirmed the idiom into which he had been moving for a year or so, and rack and ruin, Sturm und Drang, thunder and lightning remained the constants of his work until the final descent into the formless gaudiness of flower painting that marked and marred his dotage.

It is not, however, the familiar Piper of torn towers against a darkening sky, of churches dismembered by time and irreligion, of great mansions rendered eyeless and toothless by taxation and the weather, that the Dulwich Picture Gallery now celebrates - it is the decade in which the immature Piper sought maturity, the 1930s.

He came late to painting. Born in 1903, the son of a solicitor, educated at Epsom College, he was destined for his father's office in Vincent Square, but just as Sutherland, his schoolmate, disappointed the attempt to make an engineer of him, so Piper failed at law - though it was not until 1926 that he began any formal training as a painter.

He left the Royal College of Art in 1929, to marry, his course unfinished, and began, with the customary struggle, to earn his living.

With a number of young English painters we can look at the Thirties as a decade of gallant adventure to bring London into the 20th century as Paris knew it or, alternatively, as one of feeble dilettantism, of uncomprehending imitation, of impotent pastiche and of the birth of the intellectual jabberwocky and justification that has poisoned art criticism ever since.

It is all very well to stress how much Piper and his friends knew of Matisse, Picasso and Braque, of Mondrian, Brancusi and Kandinsky, of Arp, Ozenfant and Pevsner, not just from magazines, but from trawling their studios in Paris, but the result was, as Geoffrey Grigson, a contemporary critic, put it, "... a small history of English ideas, English hesitancy, English error and English performance."

I am not sure that the history was small, but the ideas certainly were - and were not even English. We recognise at once the borrowings from Cubism and Constructivism when both were in decline, only to push the decline further.

Piper and his friends thought of themselves as avant-garde, as an assault on all that Bloomsbury stood for rather more than against the Royal Academy, but with the first a spent force and the second a contemptible bastion of conservatism, they were tilting at windmills. Inexorably they moved towards pure abstraction. Piper took to it with the enthusiasm of Catholic convert.

This is not the place to discuss the narrow views and follies of the short-lived body, so exclusive in its focus on abstraction that it excluded more than half its number from its final exhibitions of 1935 and 1936 and then fizzled out. From 1934 to 1937 Piper, then secretary of this "7 & 5 Abstract Group" wholeheartedly embraced all the tricks and mannerisms of Parisian abstract art, not only of the Thirties but of the decade before the Great War began.

If Picasso stuck real newspaper to his paintings, so did Piper; if the word BAR was writ large in a still life by Braque, then as sure as eggs is eggs, Piper used it too.

If Jean Helion, a year younger than Piper and long acknowledged as a vital influence, painted repetitive shapes that "sailed with cool, marvellously painted detachment into the attitudes of classical landscape", as Mrs Piper put it, then Piper painted more - though it has always seemed to me that the unacknowledged influence of Auguste Herbin was far stronger, but that hardly matters, for both Helion and Herbin were ghastly shallow painters who got worse, far worse, as they grew older.

This monkey-see, monkey-do decade of Piper's struggle to find himself was by no means incompetent or fumbling. It began with consciously "primitive" views and figures that echo the work of Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Cedric Morris and Ben Nicholson; he "combed" wet paint with combs cut in stiff card and scratched it away with the brush reversed; he collaged pieces of paper onto his canvases, an advertisement for Wills' Superfine Shagg was used as an inn sign, for example.

He used the patterns of paper doilies as a short cut for lace curtains, engraved tumblers and decorated jugs; he discarded the perspective of plates and pots in an attempt to be sub-Cubist; he toyed with the texture of paint dry, scraped and scrubbed, paint thick and patterned with repeated strokes of the brush, and paint mixed with sand (this last, 20 years after both Picasso and Braque had done so) and he borrowed figures from Picasso.

He did none of these things badly, but in 1934, when his work became rigidly abstract, it was done scrupulously well. It was, at first, an old-fashioned combination of painting and construction, harking back half a generation to 1920 when such things were a la mode in Russia and Germany; there was nothing new or fresh about it.

Nor was there anything new and fresh about the pure paintings that succeeded it between 1935 and 1937; I must argue that they are better than those of his master, Helion, and better by quite a margin, but I cannot see that in the history of abstract art, either painter is of the least significance.

Piper's compositions march nicely from left to right, their tones are nicely judged, and odd touches of a variety of reds set them nicely alive - but such precision is, ultimately a bore. It is significant that even Betjeman felt it necessary to write of abstract painting that "...an imitative design becomes unbearable, and all the time I am thinking that Picasso or Braque ... could have done it better ..." and then, having sown this seditious notion in our minds, denied that it applied to Piper.

In 1937 Piper published an essay, "Lost, a Valuable Object". It was a resounding rejection of almost everything that he had recently done, of abstract art in general and Cubism in particular. The Cubists, he said, "...had smashed the objects into fragments (pipe, wineglass, guitar, Bass label and all), had collected the fragments carefully, made them up into a parcel, tied it with sky blue ribbon and posted it to oblivion."

Could any words have been more damning, and mocking to boot?

Six years later, by then wellestablished in his Neo-Romantic mood among the bomb-inflicted ruins of London and Coventry, Bristol and Bath, he wrote to Paul Nash: "After an abstract period what a release one feels!"

It is a wry state of affairs that towards the end of his life Piper was far more esteemed by the panjandrums for his early abstract paintings and constructions, though they occupied him for only four years, and that since his death, the Neo-Romantic images that have given so many so much simple pleasure, have by the pundits been posted to oblivion instead of the Cubist shards.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is brave in its effort to educate us, but most of us, I imagine, are relieved to reach the exhibition's end and in the last room be given a hint by the landscapes and buildingscapes of 1939 and 1940, of that other Piper who, as Betjeman put it, disregarded contemporary taste and welded his poetic love of England with clear principles of what a picture should be.

After half a century of welding poetic love to principle, however, the sane man is aware only of Piper's fatal facility in self-repetition. Perhaps the best epitaph is, after all, Kenneth Clark's shrewd observation: "John Piper was the ideal recorder of bomb damage."

Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21. Tues-Fri 10am-5pm. Weekends and bank holiday Mondays 11am-5pm (closed other Mondays). Admission £7. Until 22 June.

MORE ABOUT

Art Events

Looking for maturity

Read More