When I asked my distinguished art-critic friend if he’d like to join me to look round the recent Piper exhibition (John Piper: The Forties) at the Imperial War Museum, his response was, “No, I liked him too much as a teenager and I don’t want to spoil it.” You can see what he means, and maybe most of us feel the same way, but it still seems odd that once universally admired artists like Piper have become entirely disengaged from the driving force of contemporary art. There they sit, idling, their gears stuck in neutral; neutered; neutralised; sealed in a bubble of nostalgic regard but as redundant as a typewriter in an age of PCs.
Few people would argue that Piper was not an outstanding artist, but he’s not, apparently, the kind of artist we need these days. Once he was the model of everything an artist ought to be: skilled in a huge range of techniques – painting, printmaking, poster design, photography, stained glass, sets and costumes, illustration – and a successful journalist to boot. And yet these craft-based skills are hardly regarded today, when the idea is all and the execution – often carried out by uncredited assistants – is designed to be as impersonal as a hairbrush or a hatchback. But in Piper the execution is always as personal as the subject –often more so, in fact, with its scratching, scraping, scribbling and scumbling, collage and wash, cut-outs and calligraphy.
Piper came from the last generation of artists and writers for whom having a private income was hardly unusual and nothing to be ashamed of: though his father, a successful solicitor, objected to him not joining the family firm so strongly that he cut him out of his will, his mother paid him an allowance and, in 1935, bought the flint-and-brick farm outside Henley where Piper lived and worked for the rest of his life. Despite its ooh-er missus name of Fawley Bottom, the photographer Peter Burton recalls it being “a magical place – I miss it still: visiting Fawley Bottom was always like going home.”
Here Piper and his wife Myfanwy received a stream of visitors, especially during the war, when it seems to have turned into something of an intellectual squat. As David Fraser Jenkins describes it in the excellent exhibition catalogue, “The house was used as storage for people and things, and several friends left children with the Pipers to look after. Through Piper’s various friendships, the libraries of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Curwen Press, and the records of the Group Theatre, were housed in the farm buildings… Also stored there at times were Mervyn Horder’s grand piano, which allowed Piper and a musical guest to play duets, as well as the business records of Robert Wellington’s Contemporary Lithographs, and his car.”
It was, of course, Piper’s wartime pictures of bomb-shattered buildings that made his reputation, though ironically he’d already become something of a specialist in ruins – albeit ancient ruins rather than modern ones. It was Kenneth Clark, aka the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, which in 1940 commissioned Piper to record some of the country’s 15,000 bomb-damaged churches. (Clark said of the WAAC, “We employed every artist whom we thought had any merit, not because we supposed that we would get records of the war more truthful or striking than those supplied by photography, but because it seemed a good way of preventing artists being killed.”)
Piper’s records of these “instant ruins” became iconic images of the war, climaxing in the paintings he made of Coventry Cathedral only hours after its destruction on 14 November 1940. Wandering the still-smoking streets of the devastated city, he felt (understandably enough) unequal to the situation until, passing an undamaged house by the cathedral, he noticed it had a solicitors’ plate outside. Piper rang the bell. “It was a port in a storm,” he wrote. “I went up and there was a girl tapping away at a typewriter, in a seat by an upper window, as if nothing had happened. I said ‘Good morning. It’s a beastly time isn’t it?’ And she explained that she had only just come on duty. I told her I had been ordered to do some drawings. She said ‘Of course, you can have my place.’ She moved her typewriter to the other side of the room and I started drawing the Cathedral.”
By the end of that month the Ministry of Information had published one of Piper’s Coventry paintings as a postcard which, in Fraser Jenkins words, for a time “became for Britain what Picasso’s Guernica had been for Spain, a symbol of national resistance to Hitler.” It was this single image, more than any other, that laid the foundations for Piper’s post-war success, and it was in his wartime pictures that he perfected his post-war style – to the extent that Malcolm Yorke, in his book on the Neo-Romantics, Spirit of Place (published in 1988 while Piper was still alive), was able to write, oddly dismissively, that “There seems little need to supply further details of Piper’s career since the 1940s.”
In a way, though, Yorke was right: Piper’s highly mannered approach to his subjects – theatrical, emotionally and tonally intense – changed little over the ensuing years. Yorke captures this manner well in his description of Piper’s 1941 painting of Seaton Delaval, Vanburgh’s long-ruinous masterpiece on the Northumbrian coast: “If one looked at the picture a section at a time it would appear quite abstract… Half the picture is in darkness, but this does not necessarily mean it is night; nor do the strong brushmarks imply it is bad weather; and there are no clues as to what century is depicted. The low viewpoint, random-seeming colours and textures, silhouetted roofline, and sudden clusters of detail pulled out of the gloom are there to impress us with the drama of architecture rather than its topographical interest. Piper’s water-colours too are now agitated in surface with much use of wax-resist, pastels, oil pastels, chalk, inks and a whole repertoire of devices to make the picture pulse with energy.”
The key word here, as Yorke’s italics suggest, is drama, and Piper remained an incorrigibly dramatic painter long after the visually spectacular and psychologically traumatic 1939-1945 years were overlaid by the car-washing catatonia of the post-war decades – which may help explain his continuing popularity among older generations as well as his unfashionability in the emotionally shallow world of contemporary art. Ironically, Piper learned most of his repertoire of devices during his years as a doctrinaire abstractionist, when Ben Nicholson showed him how to add textural interest to otherwise flat surfaces by scratching and scribbling on them. Sadly, Nicholson and Piper later fell out over the latter’s defection to the figurative camp, especially, one imagines, when Piper took up with the whimsy-loving John Betjeman, with whom he went on to edit the inimitable Shell county guides – a sideline Piper was to pursue almost until his death in 1992.
The question of whether Piper matters any more is largely rhetorical: however enjoyable it remains, his work is apparently of little help to artists now, neither obscure enough to be rediscovered nor weird enough to be inspiring. But it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the kind of artist Piper represents – with his multiplicity of craft and technical skills and his ability to work successfully in a wide range of media, from print-making to photography, from journalism to stained glass – is no longer an example to be imitated or admired, and certainly not one taught on the leading courses in fine arts. Whether we have gained or lost by this only time will tell.