Personal vision

At the beginning of Richard Ingrams’s book on John Piper (1903–92), he quotes the artist as saying: ‘The basic and unexplainable thing about my paintings is a feeling for places.

At the beginning of Richard Ingrams’s book on John Piper (1903–92), he quotes the artist as saying: ‘The basic and unexplainable thing about my paintings is a feeling for places. Not for “travel”, but just for going somewhere — anywhere, really — and trying to see what hasn’t been seen before.’ It’s a good description of what makes Piper’s best work special and memorable, that feeling not just for identifying the spirit of a place, but for depicting it as never before.

In this way, Piper at his most focused and intense (essentially at his most personal) transcends the topographical and moves into that higher realm of inquiry and statement we call art. A new exhibition, currently spread over three venues, restricts itself intelligently to the work Piper made of two counties — Kent and Sussex. The very narrowness of its remit results paradoxically in richness: this is one of the most instructive and enjoyable Piper exhibitions I’ve seen.

The unassuming concrete bunker that is Mascalls Gallery has been packed with work which fires up the walls. Here is the heart of the exhibition and, if you have time and energy to visit only one of the venues, this is the place to come; Tunbridge Wells Museum and Scotney Castle form interesting adjuncts, but the meat is at Mascalls. The exhibition’s curator, Nathaniel Hepburn, has worked hard to track down rarely seen Pipers, and roughly 80 per cent of the work comes from private collections. This research has paid off triumphantly, and Hepburn has located sufficient material to hang the display thematically and chronologically, from 1930 to 1984, grouping works in such a way as to show them at their best and to tell us much through comparison and contrast.