18 NOVEMBER 2000, Page 72

Exhibitions 2

John Piper: The Forties (Imperial War Museum, till 28 January)

Distinctive images

Mark Glazebrook

According to Anita Brookner in her new book Romanticism and its Discontents, a romantic prefers travelling hopefully to arriving. John Piper pursued a sort of enchantment with his native land. He trav- elled hopefully and, on reaching some- where that appealed to his acute sense of place, he did not record it exactly but man- aged to turn it into a John Piper. The skies in his landscapes are consistently dark enough to indicate a specific artist's tem- perament. This, of course, did not prevent George VI from commiserating with him on his 'bad luck with the weather', which in John Piper's 'Shelter Experiments near Woburn, Bedfordshire', Imperial War Museum turn prompted an affectionate Osbert Lan- caster cartoon. Thunder and lightning are in the air; the artist sits on the ground near a Gothic porch, white of hair and gaunt of feature, with a drawing-board propped up by one knee. His face is a picture of stern concentration; he is impervious to the slanting rain. The cartoon is entitled 'Mr John Piper enjoying his usual luck with the weather', 1947.

Piper was born in 1903. To begin with he earned more by writing than painting or stage design or stained-glass windows. From 1935 onwards, the Piper family lived in Fawley Bottom Farmhouse, tucked away in an apparently secluded, wooded hollow in the Thames valley, not far from Henley. Creativity flourished there on a bedrock of domestic order. The Pipers also owned a genuinely remote Welsh cottage. It was used as a base for painting. 'I am afraid I never take a holiday,' Piper informed his Welsh wife-to-be, Myfanwy Evans, a writer, editor and friend of the avant-garde French painter Jean Helion and of Benjamin Brit- ten, and a noted John Betjeman heart- throb — adding, 'I hope you don't mind.'

Everyone in the British Isles of Anglo- Saxon, Celtic or Iberian origin with half an interest in art, architecture or theatre, and many who are more interested in geogra- phy, history or religion, can recognise a John Piper. Few Modern British sales at Sotheby's or Christie's are without at least one example of his work. In search of a painting to encapsulate Nikolaus Pevsner's phrase and book title, The Englishness of English Art, it would be hard to beat a Romantic 1940s John Piper watercolour: possibly a view from Windsor Castle, or of Holkham, or Renishaw — to adorn Osbert Sitwell's autobiography — or of • North Wales. (I wish this show included some of Piper's paintings of the Vale of Clwyd, incidentally.) There was nothing wildly Byronic about Piper's life style, with the possible excep- tion of his passion for a particular desert- ed stretch of Snowdonia but, like Graham Sutherland, he acknowledged the influ- ence of Romantic English landscapists such as Samuel Palmer. He failed to appreciate Raymond Mortimer's `Neo- Romantic' label, but it stuck. It suited him better, or at least longer, than many oth- ers to whom it has been applied, such as Keith Vaughan and Prunella Clough. Unlike Paul Nash, another very English artist, Piper was not attracted by Surrealism.

The Imperial War Museum continues to mount admirable one-man shows of the work of some of the best 20th-century British artists. This one is curated by the Tate's David Frazer-Jenkins, who has writ- ten a thoughtful catalogue introduction full of new information and insights. It is subti- tled 'The Forties' and it was not until his late thirties that Piper found his own, well- recognised way as a painter.

It may surprise some visitors that the exhibition kicks off with 'Forms on a Green Ground', 1936, a big abstract oil on canvas which at first sight looks a long way from his familiar, smallish landscapes in water- colour or gouache. This large abstract painting betrays the influence of Bell Nicholson. It's an attractive design but it lacks Nicholson's impeccable exactness and intensely restrained sensibility. Piper once told me that he was a little ashamed, in ret- rospect, of how greatly he had once allowed Ben Nicholson to dominate him; yet this exhibition shows that the influence of cool, classical, international, non- Romantic Abstraction was eventually a positive, if hidden, factor in the forging of his mature style. There are some dramatic nudes reclining in a Romantic landscape in the exhibition. Their limbs are rounded, but the heads don't always join on to the bodies convinc- ingly. Piper drew well enough to be in demand as a stage designer, but Sutherland and Moore, with whom he was shown by various official wartime and postwar exhibiting bodies, were in a higher class as draughtsmen. Nevertheless, Piper was good at making fast, lively marks which in aggre- gate created a remarkably distinctive image.

In the 1940s the spontaneity of his water- colours and gouaches make the surfaces of some of the oils look turgid by comparison. Piper was remarkably effective in pen, ink and wash and when limiting himself to almost black, white and ochre, He was also an interesting colourist, capable of making patches of the three primary colours plus black and white into memorable, moody pictures of ruined buildings. As a war artist, he was commissioned to paint blitzed London, one of the most dangerous places to be in the second world war. After 1940 there was never enough overt Modernism in Piper's work to alienate his wide and loyal public.