Review: John Piper at The Mead

John Piper, A Tate Liverpool Exhibition, at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick University, until 21^stJune 2018.

A version of Tate Liverpool’s Spring 2018 survey of John Egerton Christmas Piper’s career, excluding only his sculpture, a good choice considering what was left only just fitted into the Mead’s space as a linear story. We saw paintings and collages of landscapes and buildings, sketchbooks, documentation of his editorship of Axis magazine and work for theatre, photography for the Shell Guides, as well as his collaborative work with Patrick Reynteins to create stained glass for the great lantern window in Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral and stunning baptistery window in Coventry’s St Michael’s Cathedral. These form his lasting legacy so there was also a child-friendly DIY stained glass projection activity.  

Piper belonged to that number of British mid-century artists, such as Nash, Hepworth & Nicolson, who wrestled with abstraction, and who faced both lack of understanding from traditional academic artistic circles and accusations of mediocrity in art history in comparison to the creative leaps made by European artists such as Picasso and Matisse. 

We are shown how deeply Piper was influenced by European abstraction; at one point evangelically launching and editing Axis magazine, the London-based quarterly review of Abstract Painting and Sculpture with his wife Myfanwy Piper (neé Evans), then rejecting it for a figurative approach just as his new style broke through. However, his work retained techniques of collage and layering he admired in cubism, as well as its strong motifs - a sort of poetic shorthand he used to depict recognisably British landscapes that yet remained individual to the locations he constantly explored. 

It was for calling out this landscape’s ordinary details that he became held in fond regard by the 1940s generation – patterns in seaweed on the beach, village churches, a line of shop fronts, the shape of gables; altogether an interest in the commonplace. Although he remained quietly influential – I remember his drawings in a primary school leaving gift in 1983; a learn-to-draw-book – his work was not sufficiently daring enough to maintain his reputation through successive waves of artistic development in the latter half of the 20^thcentury.

Although this survey intends to demonstrate his experimental mentality in terms of both technique and collaboration, looking at the works here I realised his main palette of navy, browns, russets, creamy whites and a describing black top layer, all derived from the atmospheric blue that predominates Britain, and remained constantly identifiable. This palette is apparent in my two favourite paintings, both made within the war artist programme: the just ruined Coventry Cathedral (image) and Christ Church, Newgate Street, London: shards of scarred stonework exposed in stark floodlit primary colours, silhouetted against the blackout sky. 

Piper’s is the last exhibition for The Mead’s large exhibition space before it is demolished as part of Warwick Arts Centre 20:20 redevelopment. Its next, a collaborative exhibition with the Herbert Art Gallery is Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’, is part of its programme of Outside the Boxevents intended to sustain its reputation as an established contemporary art space throughout redevelopment, until reopening in Coventry City of Culture year 2020.

Image: Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940 - John Piper - 1940. Made from sketches made on 15 November 1940, the day after its destruction in an air raid.