ART
John Piper at the Leicester Galleries
SOME of us find abstract painting, and the atmosphere in which it is produced, a little too rarefied, too removed from common
interests. Our vision may be corrupt, but we are not wanting in visual appetite, and even though we may not require every picture to tell a story, we don't mind its being about some- thing as well as being agreeable per se. We cannot help warming to Mr. Piper, who has managed to bring abstraction down to earth, and to make of it not an end in itself but a means to an end. Apart from his own striking development as a painter, this feat suggests a new and fruitful opening for contemporary painting generally—an advance from the esoteric.
Mr. Piper's pictures are either landscapes or studies of the insides and outsides of buildings. He sees his subjects as a painter should, as if they had been seen for the first time, and he admits no bipeds to his world of sky and roofs and walls and leaves and rocks and water, so that any " human interest" remains implicit. He makes no secret of his anti-
quarian, architectural and topographical leanings, but never leaves us doubting that his first concern is to construct and to paint a picture. This he does with skill, imagination and indi- viduality. He is " in the tradition," but an innovator. In his water-colours he suggests that he is a descendant of Cotman, from whom, perhaps, he has learnt a valuable habit of simplifi- cation. At the same time a useful eclecticism allows him to enjoy his contemporaries, and there seem to be affinities with Chirico (Cheltenham Fantasia), Ivon Hichens (Milton Abbas), and Graham Sutherland (Pembrokeshire Coast). The impor- tant thing is that he has an eye of his own, a handwriting of his own, and a poetry of his own. His sense of colour in particular enables him to convince us at a glance that what he has to say is dramatic and momentous, and he is able to give us at once the double shock of recognition and discovery that may come, for instance, from a poem or poetic image. He would know what Goethe meant by " the contrary of reality in order to obtain the maximum of truth," but would not strain after it : thus in Desirable Residence, Reading or A Simmonds House, Windsor, a harlequin gaiety or a soft glamour is sud- denly perceived to be the essence of what might commonly be regarded as the drab or banal. Mr. Piper's apprehension of the natural forms of rocks, water, clouds, his love of the com- plexion of stone and plaster, and his delight in the varieties of architecture, as expressions of the most diverse aspirations, can be employed to produce an effect of grandeur, as in the picture of Holkham, or of extraordinary intensity, as in the Cottage by the Railway and the Lodge at Savernake. Alto- gether, this exhibition is likely to establish him, if he is not already so recognised, as a person of importance in contem- porary English painting and one of the most distinguished painters of his own generation. WILLIAM PLOMER.
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