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'.
