Michael Murray-Fennell observes how John Piper discovered a very British type of Modernism
In August 1921, John Piper, then aged 17, compiled a holiday diary charting a trip from Ipswich in Suffolk to Saffron Walden in Essex. It’s a delight, full of tiny ink sketches of different architectural sights and details —churches and great houses, fonts and doors—all pasted carefully into the journal’s pages and each accompanied by a scrupulous entry in neat, smudge-free handwriting.
By the time he was in his late twenties, Piper’s sketchbook was being filled with gouache and ink copies of works by Pablo Picasso as well as reproductions of his paintings. Included in the retrospective at Tate Liverpool, both notebooks serve to highlight the different sides to Piper—the antiquarian and the abstract artist—sides that, at the start of his career, he struggled to reconcile until the fire of the Second World War forged them together.
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