Exhibitions
John Piper: Georgian Arcadia (Marlborough Fine Art, till 16 October) Helion (Albemarle Gallery, till 14 October)
Autumn artists
Giles Auty
With summer no longer a discernible British season, autumn might be forgiven for not knowing when to start. However, in our northerly latitudes autumn and winter are traditionally the punctual seasons, moving in with brisk, Nordic efficiency in Rencontre', 1978, by Jean Helion their appropriate weeks. Significantly no northern songsmith is ever likely to write, `Winter may be a little late this . year.' Autumn, too, generally goes by the calen- dar; within nights of the official start-line temperatures have begun to fall.
For those who live in or near cities, the passing of the seasons appears much less marked. It is country-dwellers who have reason to note the subtler changes and so feel the full poignancy of fading summer or the first signals of spring. This is one reason why the heart of British romantic- ism remains in the countryside. Weather, season and time of day play vital roles in setting the mood of both Romantic and neo-Romantic paintings.
John Piper is a renowned painter of gardens, garden buildings and ruins, so it is appropriate that the current exhibition of his work at Marlborough Fine Art (6 Albemarle Street, W1) should have been arranged to mark the Golden Jubilee of the Georgian Society. Georgian landowners were notable devotees of the romantic garden landscape. In Maria Edgeworth's novel The Absentee, Mrs Rafferty liked to show off 'a little conservatory, a little pinery, a little grapery, a little aviary, a little pheasantry, and a little dairy for show, and a little cottage for ditto, with a grotto full of shells, and a little hermitage full of earwigs, and a little ruin full of looking glass.' With his restless line and broad sweeps of colour, John Piper pays a personal homage to all such charming relics. Three 1940s paintings of West Wycombe Park show the artist at his sensitive best. 'View in West Wycombe Park 1941' reminds me also of the artist's friendship with the late Frances Hodgkins. The work has some of the extraordinary charge typical of her best productions. A black and white drawing done at Stowe, `Oxford Bridge and Boycott Pavilion', also cleverly evokes the time of year. Two oil paintings, `Lacock Abbey 1940' and 'Tem- ple of the Four Winds, Castle Howard, Yorkshire 1944', make use of an interest- ing technique in which complex, incised surfaces provide a lively counterpoint to plain. This method was skilfully employed also by Ben Nicholson.
John Piper 'was born in 1903 and met many of the leading artists of his day, including his almost exact contemporary Jean Helion. Like the latter, Piper ex- perimented with abstraction — in his case briefly — before returning to art based on natural appearances. To represent John Piper by a single, abstract work was one of the major absurdities of the exhibition British Art in the 20th Century shown earlier this year at the Royal Academy. Piper stands in the best traditions of English rural romanticism, to which he gives his own distinctive, autumnal edge. One must surmise such art does not suit the narrow tastes of those influential city- dwellers who applied shallow notions of international significance to exclude ge- nuinely national art forms from this major survey of British art. Why we tolerate such meddling with our history is a mystery.
By happy chance the first exhibition of Jean Helion's work for over 20 years is taking place only a few doors from Marl- borough Fine Art at the Albemarle Gallery (18 Albemarle Street, W1). John Piper's wife, Myfanwy, has contributed a moving introductory letter to the show's catalogue, recalling mutual friends met in the Paris of bygone days. Sixty years ago, the artist's daily companions were such as Arp, Ernst, Gabo, Lipchitz, Miro, Mondrian and Pevs- ner. Although Helion's eyesight is failing now, the current exhibition includes major works from the last five years. Helion's involvement with abstraction began earlier and lasted longer than Piper's. His renun- ciation came nevertheless at much the same time, shortly before the second world war: 'I try to understand how, in spite of the elevation of the preoccupations of the abstract tendencies, their realisations are smashed by any Raphael or Poussin . . . When I compare the best works of today with Cimabue, I cannot doubt that Cima- bue goes further . . In the autumn of his career, Helion has had the misfortune to be included in recent exhibitions of New Figuration, including A New Spirit in Painting. Most of the artists taking part in such shows were not born when Helion made his historic return to the figurative ranks. Helion's brand of 'new figuration' began 50 years ago; a half-century which has seen the comings and goings of a score of similarly modish movements.
The reputations of Piper and Helion have suffered degrees of eclipse during this period, as critical focus has flittered from one avant-garde cul-de-sac to the next. In spite of acclaimed liberalism, modernist orthodoxy has never been short of vehe- mence in its proscriptions. In the past 50 years, artists have been free to do anything — except return to the great unbroken tradition of European figurative painting, of course.
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