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20/06/03
John Piper in the 1930s – Abstraction
on the Beach
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 1 April-22 June 2003.
Dulwich Picture Gallery marks the centenary of
John Piper's birth with a major exhibition devoted to his formative
years. The exhibition is curated by David Fraser Jenkins, Senior
Curator at the Tate, and Frances Spalding from the University of
Newcastle; their biographical portrait of the working lives of John
and Myfanwy Piper (née Evans) has been published to coincide
with the current exhibition. David Jenkins also authored an earlier
work on Piper, John Piper: The Forties (2000).
This exhibition is devoted to Piper's work in the 1930s: paintings,
watercolours and photographs. Charting his early career, it shows
Piper as one of the pioneers of modern art in Britain. Describing
the sea as a 'powerful emotive agent', Piper drew on the
imagery of the sea, beaches, cliffs and harbours for his painting.
In the introductory text to the catalogue, Frances Spalding argues
that Piper's distinct abstract language of form, line and colour
derived from 'nautical objects, in the shapes and colours of
buoys, staysails, masts and hulls of boat'. In fact, Piper
was open to many influences in his long career (he lived to the
age of 92) and the Dulwich exhibition presents the 1930s as a seminal
period for him. He travelled extensively in England to visit churches,
and photographed early English sculpture, believing that:
… the purely non-figurative artists of some of the early
Northumbrian and Cornish crosses were the forebears of the pure
abstractionists of today. 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.1
In the final edition of AXIS (the influential abstract art
journal edited by Myfanwy Piper), published in the winter of 1937,
John Piper wrote about the influence of prehistoric archaeology
and air photography on our sense of 'spaces and forms and vistas'.
The present exhibition, however, focuses on the influence of the
sea and coastal imagery on the development of his work.
Abstraction in England began in the tentative experiments of the
Bloomsbury artists, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, in the years
before World War 1. The critic Roger Fry, who had organised two
seminal exhibitions of Post Impressionist art, the first showing
in England of Cézanne, Matisse et al, in 1910 and
1912 respectively, belonged to the same circle of friends and exerted
considerable influence on these and other artists at the time. Fry
described a purely abstract language as 'a visual music',
an immediate expression of reality. In fact, Bell and Grant produced
only a small number of abstract works. A more consistent form of
abstraction was the harsh, angular, architectonic work of the Vorticists.
While interest in abstract art may have waned during the years of
the first war, by 1932 Paul Nash wrote in the Listener that
abstract art was again very much alive. He wrote:
What is wanted in England is greater mental independence, an
intelligent, unprejudiced study of modern movements and methods,
combined with an ideal to form standards for ourselves and to
evolve a national style.2
Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art was published in
1931 and Art Now in 1933. Myfanwy Evans was the driving force
behind the magazine AXIS, first published in January 1935.
It was devoted to Abstract art and John Piper who wrote regularly
on art, supported the project with great enthusiasm.
Between 1929 and 1934 Piper lived in a cottage in Betchworth, Surrey.
From there he had easy access to a number of beaches on the South
Coast. In the Listener he wrote that in England no place
was further than 70 miles from the coast. 'The sea is the mystery
that lies beyond the flat fields and the woods and downs, the rough
moors and the Black Country recesses: never far away'.3 In
the Architectural Review (January 1938), he extolled the
nautical style making the connection between maritime style and
modern art, design, and architecture. In this, he absorbed the atmosphere
of his times in terms of the interplay between various aspects of
the visual arts. As the current 'Art Deco' exhibition
at the V&A displays 'style' in areas of interior design,
the applied arts, industrial design and architecture were influenced
by the great developments in technology. Le Corbusier made the connection
between maritime imagery and modern art in his seminal writing,
Vers une architecture (published in England as Towards
a New Architecture 1927), where he described the steamship ('a
machine for transport') as a further 'important manifestation
of temerity, of discipline, of harmony, of a beauty that is calm,
vital and strong'.4 He recommended that a modern house should
be conceived as economically as a ship's cabin.
John Piper (born 1903) worked in his father's law firm, under sufferance,
until 1927 when his father died. He then felt free to study art,
which his mother supported. He attended the Richmond School of Art
in Surrey and the Royal College of Art, London, but left without
completing his diploma. While establishing himself as an artist,
Piper wrote reviews and, in the process, made friends with a number
of artists. He began to exhibit regularly in 1931. Receptive to
many sources at this stage, he appears to have taken as the starting
point for his own maritime paintings, Braque's Dieppe paintings
of 1929, in reproduction in Cahier d'art. Piper later admitted
the influence of Braque on his experimentation in collage, in which
he achieved a surrealistic effect by using newspaper, marbled paper,
and detailed engravings of shells and fish cut from aquarium catalogues.
At the invitation of Ben Nicholson, Piper joined the 7 & 5
society and exhibited in its March 1934 exhibition. Its members
included Barbara Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens, David Jones, Henry Moore
and Winifred Nicholson. As the first room of the Dulwich exhibition
reveals, Piper was producing seaside still-lifes at this time with
an assortment of objects: bottles, jugs, shells and books. They
are carefully placed on window ledges with views beyond to harbour
buildings, quays and boats. His debt to various artists including
Dufy is evident.
Piper's 1934 trip to Paris was of great importance in the development
of his work. There he saw Alexander Calder's wire sculptures. Soon
after, he experimented in the same vein. In the same year he met
Myfanwy Evans who later became his second wife. Evans played an
important part in Piper's art career. In 1934 she travelled independently
to Paris where she met Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Domela, Giacometti,
all of whom became seminal figures in 20th century art. This experience
prompted her to start a journal devoted to abstract art.
Behind AXIS was the Paris experience of emigré artists
who viewed abstract art as a calm order in response to contemporary
conflict and chaos. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who Evans
met through Piper, had some involvement with artists there and were
already in the process of developing their own abstract language.
AXIS, in turn, gave them considerable coverage. Piper was
a vital force in the magazine's short life assisting in all aspects
of its production. The publication of Axis: A Quarterly Review
of Contemporary 'Abstract' Painting and Sculpture, was
announced by Paul Nash in The Times (12 June1933) and described
as 'the expression of a truly contemporary spirit'. AXIS
sought to avoid a strict purism in its agenda, allowing instead
a diversity of views. In terms of its editorial, AXIS was
less compelling than its appearance. A divisive element in the first
issue was an article by Paul Nash in which he stated that if he
translated totally beyond the image, he would suffer in spirit.
Nicholson and Hepworth were angry that he was undermining their
position.
Piper himself, a key figure in the magazine's existence, also found
that he required things English, and continued his travels around
the country to pursue his love of stained glass and Anglo-Saxon
and Romanesque carvings. In these he found 'immense personal
conviction'. AXIS promoted Piper's career greatly in
terms of published appreciation of his work while providing a platform
for his own writings. He met a great many other artists and theorists
and organised a number of important exhibitions.
By 1935, the political climate rendered the approach in AXIS,
quite untenable. Debates on the role of art in society raged and,
in response to the Spanish Civil War (1936), a marked shift took
place; articles on Seurat, Poussin and Cézanne were included.
AXIS published its eighth and final issue early in 1937.
Piper announced, a year later, that abstraction was a luxury. He
returned to nature, to the beach on the South coast where, as this
exhibition shows, he did some of his best work. In its short life
AXIS made a great contribution to art in England. It became
possible for British artists to have a dialogue with international
modern movements. John and Myfanwy contributed to the courageous
campaign, embarked upon by Roger Fry 25 years earlier, to introduce
modern art and ideas to England.
1. John Piper, "England's Early Sculptors", Architectural Review,
October 1936. Quoted by Frances Spalding, John Piper in the 1930s:
Abstraction on the Beach, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Merrell Publishers,
London, 2003, p.38.
2. Ibid, p.21.
3. Ibid, p.9.
4. Ibid, p.10.
Dr Janet McKenzie
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