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John Piper in his studio |
Colourful past of lives lived vividly in the present
Frances Spalding’s biography of John and Myfanwy Piper is a dazzling portrait of an artistic partnership, writes John Horder
John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art.
By Frances Spalding. Oxford University Press £25
EZRA Pound, the poet, said it is only the most insatiable curiosity that keeps the true poet and artist alive and kicking. Curiosity bubbles away in a Blakean cauldron throughout Frances Spalding’s 600-page dazzling biography of John Piper, the painter, and his second wife, Myfanwy. But nowhere more so than in a letter from the obsessed John Betjeman to her.
This was after the two Johns had started working on the Shell Guide to Shropshire – a partnership that was to last several decades – and John and Myfanwy had moved to Fawley Bum (their nickname for Fawley Bottom) in the Chilterns shortly before the Second World War.
Both men’s claims to fame owed much to their love of visiting English churches for the Shell guides before Pevsner got in on his separate act.
“Darling Goldilocks,” begins infatuated Betjie to Myfanwy. “At the analyst’s I went ‘right back to the pram’ and thought I would like to be wheeled by you up Swain’s Lane [Highgate] past the Cemetery Chapel round by South Grove and down West Hill and round Merton Lane, along the edge of the Heath and back to West Hill by Brookfield Lane. Then I would like to be taken out and breastfed. Then I would like to be led to school at Byron House by you and get into a scrape.” Say no more about a poet’s fantasies.
Later on, Frances Spalding, researcher and biographer extraordinaire, unearths fascinating information about Myfanwy’s English teacher, Florence Gibbons, at the North London Collegiate School. It used to be in the Camden Road, near the New Journal’s offices, before moving to Colindale. After 10 years’ service at NLCS, Ms Gibbons died of tuberculosis in 1932, aged 36.
She was a devout Anglo-Catholic with a nervous giggle. It says much for her infectious love of literature that she helped nurture Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm), poet Stevie Smith and Dame Helen Gardner, who went on to edit the Oxford Book of English Verse and helped her to get into Oxford by writing about Milton.
John Piper’s career took off like a firework on January 1 1935 when the first issue of Axis, a quarterly review of contemporary “abstract” painting and sculpture, came out, edited by Myfanwy. It cost two shillings and six pence. John was a co-producer and designed the cover. The artists discussed in the first issue included Arp, Giacometti. Hepworth, Kandinsky, Miro, Moore, Nicholson and Picasso, some of whom they got to know as good friends.
By the beginning of the war, Myfanwy had weaned John off his obsession with abstract painting, and he begun his career as a more historically based painter, set-designer, maker of fabrics, tapestries, fireworks and the creator of the most iconic stained glass anywhere in the world.
Spalding writes most fascinatingly of all about John’s heaven-sent collaboration with Patrick Reyntiens, another great artist and maker of stained glass.
It began when both men received major commissions from Eton College Chapel and the new Coventry Cathedral, within a very short space of time.
John Russell, the art critic, wrote that John and Myfanwy’s fertile partnership “seemed to many observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships, good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work and creativity”. He added: “Only those who live most vividly in the present deserve to inherit the past”. This was a fitting epitaph. |
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