Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1539834
JOHN PIPER (1903-1992) The Slopes of Glyder-Fawr, Llyn Idwal, Caernarvonshire, 1948 Oil on canvas Signed 41 x 49.5 cm (16 x 19 ½ in) Provenance Given by the artist as a wedding present to his niece, Joy Selby-Green, 1948 Thence by descent to the present day This picture has been in the artist's family since the year it was painted. Ede was crucial in developing Piper's interest in contemporary French art in the late 1920s, drawing his attention to musical references in Braque's work, which inspired him to decorate a chest in similar style. 1 In July 1934, Piper told Myfanwy Evans that he had met Braque at Ede's house, when he joined a post-supper gathering that included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion and Albert Gallatin. 2 A month later, Evans travelled to Paris, where she visited the studios of Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky and Giacometti, and where Hélion encouraged her to begin a journal. 3 The first issue of Axis in January 1935, with a cover designed by Piper and illustrations of work by Picasso, Kandinsky, Giacometti, Calder, Miró, Mondrian, Arp, Hélion, Hepworth, Moore, Piper, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash, included an essay by Ede entitled 'Modern Art'. Evans had begun her editorial by addressing the definition of 'abstract': a term so 'inadequate and misleading' that the subtitle of Axis cloaked it in inverted commas. Ede, for his part, defined abstract art as: a kind of discipline that arises from a real vitality and a desire to define, to get back to the basic uses of art. It is a kind of discipline which opposes itself to the degenerations of the Royal Academy, and out of it will spring a clearer conception of the nature of art. 4 Ede would acquire a mixed-media collage by Piper, Littlestone on Sea (1936), depicting the beach and lighthouse. In the post-war years Piper's work was dominated by the landscape of Wales as, in an act almost of purification, he turned from scenes of urban destruction to the romantic seclusion of North Wales. Piper, Myfanwy and their young family lived in a rented cottage in Nant-Ffrancon, a dramatic glaciated valley in Snowdonia. The cottage had no electricity or running water, cooking had to be done on a primus stove and when it rained the building flooded. The Pipers' spartan accommodation is reflected in the intensity of the pictures, where in reference to King George VI's celebrated remark, the artist 'had bad luck with the weather'. Piper's Snowdonia paintings are among his longest and most sustained series, and, in David Fraser Jenkins's opinion, 'some of his best work.' The artist showed an almost 18th-century zeal for the sublime: I felt that I was seeing the mountains for the first time and seeing them as nobody had seen them before. This was partly due to the feeling of release after the confining of The War, partly to a 'spurt' in my capacity to observe more clearly at this particular time. Each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality: for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the 'line' of mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock- world in fog. 5 Another version of this picture, in mixed media on paper, was formerly owned by Kenneth Clark and is now in the collection of The Whitworth Art Gallery. 6 Piper also made a lithograph of the view in 1950. We are most grateful to Hugh Fowler-Wright for his assistance with this entry. 1 Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 24–25. 2 Frances Spalding, The Real and the Romantic: English Art between Two World Wars, Thames & Hudson, London, 2022, p.372 fn.39. John Piper and Myfanwy Evans married in 1937. 3 The Real and the Romantic, p.292. 4 H.S. Ede, Modern Art, Axis 1, January 1935, p.23. 5 Piper's Places: John Piper in England and Wales, Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press, London, 1983, p.105. 6 David Fraser Jenkins and Hugh Fowler Wright, The Art of John Piper, Unicorn, London, 2015, fig.6.5. 88