Piper was appointed an official war artist in World War II from 1940-1942. He collaborated with many others, including the poet John Betjeman as well as with the potter Geoffrey Eastop and the artist Ben Nicholson. In later years he produced many limited-edition prints.
His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches. Along with Patrick Reyntiens he designed the stained glass windows for the new Coventry Cathedral. He also designed windows for many smaller churches. Piper created tapestries for Chichester Cathedral and Hereford Cathedral. He was a set designer for the theatre, including the Kenton Theatre, a theatre in Henley, Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, the Royal Opera House for a production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and for the operas of Alun Hoddinott
Piper also wrote extensively on modern art in books and articles. With his wife, Myfanwy Piper, he founded the contemporary art journal, Axis.
His children include painters Edward Piper and Sebastian Piper, and his grandchildren include painter Luke Piper and sculptor Henry Piper.
182 of his works are in the Tate collection, including etchings and some earlier abstractions. Major retrospective exhibitions have been held at Tate Britain (1983–1984), the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, the River and Rowing Museum and the Museum of Reading. .
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English abstract painter.
Born in 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, Nicholson was the son of the painter Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and the brother of Nancy Nicholson. The family moved to London in 1896 and Nicholson was educated at Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School, Seaford, Heddon Court, Hampstead and then as a boarder at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. He trained as an artist at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1910–1914, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, and Edward Wadsworth.
Nicholson was married three times: firstly to Winifred Roberts (married 5 November 1920 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London; divorced 1938) with whom he had three children, a son Jake in June 1927, a daughter Kate in July 1929 (who later became an artist herself) and a son Andrew in September 1931. His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth (married 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office; divorced 1951) with whom he had triplets, two daughters Sarah and Rachel and a son Simon in 1934 and third to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer (married July 1957; divorced 1977
His first notable work was following a meeting with the playwright J. M. Barrie on holiday in Rustington, Sussex in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Nicholson did a poster for Peter Pan.
Nicholson was exempted from World War I military service due to asthma. He travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other American cities, returning to England in 1918. From 1920 to 1933 he was married to the painter Winifred Nicholson and lived in London. After his first exhibition of figurative works in London in 1922, his work began to be influenced by Synthetic Cubism, and later by the primitive style of Rousseau.
In London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Moore. On visits to Paris he met Mondrian, whose work in the neoplastic style was to influence him in an abstract direction, and Picasso, whose cubism would also find its way into his work. His gift, however, was the ability to incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognizably his own. He first visited St Ives, Cornwall in 1928 with his fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he met the fisherman and painter, Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933 he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. In 1937 he was one of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public, as shown by the Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. In 1943 he joined the St. Ives Society of Artists. A retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London in 1955.
Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968 he received the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971 he separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 they divorced.
Nicholson died in London on 6 February 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green cemetery. His ashes were scattered over Golders Green Cemetery in the absence of instructions from his family, so there is no grave.
Some of Nicholson's works can be seen at the Tate St Ives gallery, and at Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge.
His first notable work was following a meeting with the playwright J. M. Barrie on holiday in Rustington, Sussex in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Nicholson did a poster for Peter Pan.
Nicholson was exempted from World War I military service due to asthma. He travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other American cities, returning to England in 1918. From 1920 to 1933 he was married to the painter Winifred Nicholson and lived in London. After his first exhibition of figurative works in London in 1922, his work began to be influenced by Synthetic Cubism, and later by the primitive style of Rousseau.
In London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Moore. On visits to Paris he met Mondrian, whose work in the neoplastic style was to influence him in an abstract direction, and Picasso, whose cubism would also find its way into his work. His gift, however, was the ability to incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognizably his own. He first visited St Ives, Cornwall in 1928 with his fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he met the fisherman and painter, Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933 he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. In 1937 he was one of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public, as shown by the Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. In 1943 he joined the St. Ives Society of Artists. A retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London in 1955.
Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968 he received the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971 he separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 they divorced.
Nicholson died in London on 6 February 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green cemetery. His ashes were scattered over Golders Green Cemetery in the absence of instructions from his family, so there is no grave.
Some of Nicholson's works can be seen at the Tate St Ives gallery, and at Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge.
Stanley Spencer (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Much of his greatest work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life. He referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven." Fellow-villagers frequently stand in for their Gospel counterparts, lending on occasion Christian teachings an eerie immediacy.
Spencer was born and spent much of his life in Cookham in Berkshire. His father, William Spencer, was a music teacher. His younger brother, Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979), was a talented painter of landscapes.
From 1908 to 1912, Spencer studied at the Slade School of Art at University College, London under Henry Tonks and others. His contemporaries at the Slade included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. So profound was his attachment to the village of his birth that most days he would take the train back home in time for tea. It even became his nickname: his fellow student C.R.W. Nevinson dubbed him Cookham, a name which Spencer himself took to using for a time.
After a long period of agonising whether or not to join up, in 1915 Spencer volunteered with the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an orderly at the Beaufort War Hospital (which later became Glenside). In 1916, the 24-year-old Spencer volunteered for service with the RAMC in Macedonia, and served with the 68th Field Ambulance unit. He subsequently volunteered to be transferred to the Berkshire Regiment. His survival of the devastation and torment that killed so many of his fellows indelibly marked Spencer's attitude to life and death. Such preoccupations come through time and again in his religious works.
Towards the end of the war he was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to paint what became Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (now in the Imperial War Museum). It was visibly the consequence of Spencer's experience in the medical corps. A further major commission was to paint murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere dedicated to the war dead. The altarpiece depicts the Resurrection of the Soldiers.
Spencer's work as a war artist in the Second World War included his epic depiction of shipbuilding workers and their families at Port Glasgow on the Clyde. When the war ended he again took up, as did certain other British neo-romantic artists of the time, his visionary preoccupations—in Spencer's case with a sometimes apocalyptic tinge.
In 1925 Spencer married Hilda Carline, then a student at the Slade and sister of the artist Richard Carline. A daughter, Shirin, was born in November of that year and a second daughter, Unity, in 1930. Carline divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later he married the artist Patricia Preece, whom he had met in Cookham; she, however, was a lesbian. She continued to live with her partner, and though she frequently posed nude for her husband, she refused to consummate the marriage. When Spencer’s bizarre relationship with Patricia finally fell apart (though she would never grant a divorce), he would visit Hilda, an arrangement that continued throughout the latter's subsequent mental breakdown. Hilda died from cancer in November 1950.
The painful intricacies of this three-way relationship became the subject in 1996 of a play by the feminist playwright Pam Gems. Titled Stanley, it starred Anthony Sher, at the National Theatre and, later, on Broadway. Nominated for a Tony Award, it won the Olivier Best New Play award for 1997.
Spencer has been the subject of several biographies. The diminutive survivor of turmoil domestic and military is depicted in his later years as a "small man with twinkling eyes and shaggy grey hair, often wearing his pyjamas under his suit if it was cold." He became a "familiar sight, wandering the lanes of Cookham pushing the old pram in which he carried his canvas and easel."
The pram, black and battered, has somehow survived, to become the most curious exhibit in the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, which is dedicated to its owner's life and works.
When a member of a British Council delegation to China not long before his death, Spencer is said to have introduced himself to Premier Zhou Enlai with the words, "Hello, I'm Stanley from Cookham."
Spencer was knighted in 1959. He died of cancer at nearby Cliveden later that year.
Spencer has been described as an early modernist painter. His works often express his fervent if unconventional Christian faith. This is especially evident in the scenes that he envisioned and depicted in Cookham. Very evident in these too is the compassion that he felt for his fellow residents. And his quirky romantic and sexual obsessions were also expressed within this home environment. But it is a mistake to regard him merely as some sort of quaint village innocent, inextricably tied to small-town England. His works originally provoked great shock and controversy. Nowadays, they still seem stylistically avant-garde, whilst the nudes that arose through the futile relationship with Patricia Preece foreshadow some of the much later works of Lucian Freud, who has expressed admiration for Spencer.
Spencer's early work is regarded as a synthesis of French Post-Impressionism, exemplified for instance by Paul Gauguin, plus early Italian painting typified by Giotto. This was a conscious choice, and Spencer was a key member of a group who called themselves the "Neo-Primitives." Allied with him were David Bomberg, William Roberts and other young contemporaries at the Slade.
His most ambitious work was the consequence of his Great War experiences: a cycle of 19 wall paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel , which took five years to complete.
Today, works such as The Resurrection, Cookham (1923–27), clearly set in the village and with actual residents taking part, rarely come up for auction, but when they do, they sell for immense sums. However, during Spencer's lifetime, it was his landscapes that were in demand. His dealer would press him to produce more, but Spencer expressed impatience, and professed that they were a chore. Nevertheless these landscapes of Cookham and its environs are still favored by many of the public.
Spencer made only three lithographs, all under the guidance of Henry Trivick.
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