Art: Romantic Realist

At 49, Englishman John Piper is in an enviable spot. His paintings are pleasant enough to appeal to middlebrows but abstract enough to satisfy the critics and all but the most austere highbrows (who think his work “too pretty”). The result: his paintings are in brisk demand, and his reputation continues to grow. Last week 31 new Piper oils and watercolors were on view in London, and the public flocked to see.

Piper’s latest subjects are conventional enough: fountains and flowers, church courtyards, an island hotel, a village pump, a lime kiln. What made the paintings unmistakably Pipers were the colors and compositions. There were great swatches of bright yellow and bone white against russet and black, planes of dark shadows with fiery pinwheels of yellow, white and red. And the scenes had an air of amiable ruin: old fonts and arches decked in new flowers. In no time most of the 31 pictures were sold or spoken for.

John Piper is now probably Britain’s leading romantic realist, but he has come to this eminence the long way round. Growing up in London and at Epsom College, he dabbled in archaeology, played the piano in an amateur dance band, wrote poetry and took art courses. He was 25 before he considered art something more than just one pleasing hobby among many.

“You’re clever enough to sink a ship,” he was once told, “but you’ll never draw.” Piper did draw, though—feathery studies of lighthouses, piers and harbors. Then, in Paris in 1933, he met Braque and switched to abstraction. “It wasn’t popular,” he remembers, “but the idea of the hard edge attracted me.”

If Piper had stayed in Paris, he might have been an abstractionist still. But he and his wife moved to a 17th century farmhouse in a valley near Henley-on-Thames. Gradually, the nature he saw around him drew him off on another track. His new style set out to blend geometric designs with the more amorphous shapes of reality—or, as he once expressed it, “a combination of a crystal and a potato, with neither predominating too much.”

Today Piper’s paintings contain nearly equal parts of the abstract crystal and the amorphous potato: precise landscapes splashed with blocks of colors that happen to interest him. When Piper finds a combination he likes, he uses it again & again. He continues to look for new combinations and new techniques. His spare time lately has been spent with wax-crayon colors and in floating paint on water in a bathtub, then lifting off the bright swirling patterns on to a piece of paper. He will have a Manhattan show next year, and is “fiddling around” between. themes. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to abstractions, though,” says Piper. “That has become too academic.”