This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper
who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the
Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them
centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century.
Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them
Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten,
and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not
only a long marriage and numerous private and professional
vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in
the visual arts, literature and music. Frances Spalding also sheds
new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle
of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry
until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in
England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day
and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry
Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political
situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John
Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging,
history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues
that are very much to the fore in today's world. Myfanwy Piper is
best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as
librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily
prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over
six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been
an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his
landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core
interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built
environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost
everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined
cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is
nowadays called industrial archeology. His capacious and divided
sensibility made him defender of many aspects of the English
landscape and the built environment, while in his art he became an
heir of that great tradition encompassing Wordsworth and Blake,
Turner, Ruskin, and Samuel Palmer. He was torn between the
pleasures of an abstract language liberated from time and place and
those embedded in the locale, in buildings, geography, and history.
Today, this expansive contradictoriness seems quintessentially
modern, his divided response finding an echo in our own ambivalence
towards modernity. Both Pipers created what seemed to many
observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships,
good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work, and creativity.
Running through their lives is a fertile tension between a
commitment to the new and a desire to reinvigorate certain native
traditions. This tension produced work that is passionate and
experimental. 'Only those who live most vividly in the present',
John Russell observed of John and Myfanwy Piper, 'deserve to
inherit the past'.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!