Brave new world

John Piper was in the vanguard of the modern British art scene when he created a career-defining work. Frances Spalding recounts the story of a painting that shaped a friendship

One of the most exciting developments within British art during the 1930s was John Piper's appearance in the field. After experimenting with collage and other modernist tropes, he arrived at a distinctive and definite vein of abstract art. His paintings caught the attention of S. J. Woods, a bright young man who wanted to promote the shared ideals linking architecture, painting, and sculpture. All three, Woods argued in Decoration, a high-class glossy periodical, had a common foundation in their use of space, light, and precision.

Two months later, in April 1936, Woods mounted an ambitious exhibition of modern art, not in a gallery but in Duncan Miller’s Showrooms in Lower Grosvenor Place. Here, among the latest in fashionable furniture, Bakelite radiograms, and delectable textiles and rugs designed by Ashley Havinden, hung paintings by John Piper, Mondrian, Miro, Ben Nicholson and other leading artists. “If you travel by car or tube or aeroplane, live in glass and concrete, move in a world where speed, light and precision are elements of importance”, Woods explained, “you expect an art arising out of this”.

John Piper fully understood this point of view. To gain a position among the avant-garde, he had not only studied the work of Picasso and Braque but also kept an eye on the world around him. 1935 was the first year that you could take a commercial flight between London and Paris. Both Piper and his colleague Ben Nicholson designed advertisements for Imperial Airways Ltd. The one by Piper announces – ‘Modern Travel for Modern People’ - and incorporates the firm’s insignia into an abstract design to convey flight. 

“He now claimed a place at the very forefront of where painting was at and was himself making history”

Piper’s own voyage into abstraction had begun with making reliefs. But in 1935, he embarked on a more mature series of abstract paintings and began titling them Painting 1935.  This refers, of course, to the work of art’s medium and its date; but at another level it also signals his complete confidence in the link between the two: this, in Piper's view, is what a painting needed to look like in an age of glass and steel, at that moment in time, in 1935. Instead of looking back at the work of others and trying to assimilate existing ideas, he now claimed a place at the very forefront of where painting was at and was himself making history. 

What gave him a sense of security was his awareness of a growing interest in the ‘modern movement’, not just in Britain but also on the Continent. Certain artists, designers and architects, among them Le Corbusier, passionately believed that the pursuit of the modern, through the use of boldness, daring, spareness and economy, would transform our cities and improve standards of living. At a time when many artists had fled totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, where modern or experimental art was banned, abstract art took on an urgency and a resonance associated with individual freedom. In the hands of Piper, Nicholson and Mondrian, to name just three artists, it strove to arrive at a style that overrode barriers of class or nationality. The toughness and originality within Piper's large abstracts owes much to the hope and optimism that flourished, momentarily, in the mid-1930s.

Just at this moment Piper’s art caught the attention of the Russian-born architect Serge Chermayeff, who came from a wealthy family. Their friendship may have begun in the offices of then Architectural Review, both men having an involvement with this magazine through their friendship with J.M. Richards, one of the editors. In the summer of 1936, Chermayeff was asked to prepare Dorland Hall for a piano exhibition, and he decided to design the entire room around a painting by John Piper, who was enormously pleased with the result. “It pleased me so much”, he told his friend Winifred Nicholson, “as it seemed the proper way to deal with that kind of painting, and so much more proper than hanging in galleries.”

“Chermayeff was asked to prepare Dorland Hall for a piano exhibition, and he decided to design the entire room around a painting by John Piper”

Almost certainly the painting that hung in Dorland Hall was the same as the large abstract that Piper at some point gave to Chermayeff and is now up for sale at Bonhams. Historically more important is the fact that this painting was shown at the Lefevre Gallery, in London, in April 1936, where Chermayeff probably first saw it. It was photographed as part of the ground-breaking ‘Abstract and Concrete’ exhibition, which had first opened in Oxford.  The painting had originally been titled Painting 1936, but this was changed to Forms on Dark Blue.

Chermeyeff was himself a painter as well as an architect, industrial designer, writer and teacher. In 1933, he had teamed up with Erich Mendelsohn and built, among other leading modernist buildings, the Bexhill Pavilion. Having recently acquired 84 acres of land in Sussex, he was in the process of getting planning permission and designing Bentley Wood, an ambitious home for himself and his family. Art was to play no small part in its design.

The main part of the house was to be divided longitudinally with a spine wall of cupboards opening on either side of the divide. Those facing southwards opened into the living and dining room, where the ceiling-to-floor windows, in their heavy frames, slid to-and-fro on noise-proof, felt-lined tracks. The upper floor was setback slightly but had a built-in terrace, making the overall façade made the house seem, Alan Powers claims, more open to the outside than any other modern house. Piper’s cool and commanding Forms on Dark Blue was to hang on an end wall in the living-room, where it could be seen to great effect, from both outside and inside the home.

“Forms on Dark Blue… increasingly became a talisman”

Chermeyeff emigrated to the United States in 1940 and from 1941 onwards kept as his principal residence a house on Cape Cod. It was here that he hung Forms on Dark Blue, which not only continued to offer delight and inspiration but increasingly became a talisman, reminiscent of the happy times he and his wife Barbara had enjoyed in the company of John and Myvanwy Piper. If the salt air at Cape Cod eventually caused some damage to the painting, the memories bound up with it remained fresh and clear. Art, after all, can play many roles.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, writer and former editor of The Burlington Magazine.

Modern British & Irish Art auction | 19 June, London, New Bond Street

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