Hit and miss in Liverpool
Pays a visit to Tate Liverpool, finding comfort with Home Front art, and disappointment with
John Piper is the most reassuringly English of 20th-century artists: a gentleman modernist, whose images of blitzdamaged buildings made him a household name in the post-war era, but who kept a distance from the more revolutionary aspects of modern art. This exhibition (rating: * * *) is out to showcase a passionate antiquarian and expert on medieval art who collaborated with John Betjeman on the iconic Shell Guides, but who was also a proponent of abstraction, in touch with international greats such as Picasso and Alexander Calder.
The opening series of abstract constructions, produced after his first visit to Paris in 1934, are nothing like you’ll have seen before from Piper, with wooden dowels and spindly metal parts placed at stark angles across abstract painted surfaces to create a sense of dynamic mechanistic movement.
We’re soon back in more familiar Piper territory in a room full of collaged paintings in which a “cubistic layering of pictorial space” is incorporated into whimsical seaside scenes. Flowing, organic forms recall Dadaist Jean Arp; dexterously fluid brushwork, the cubist Georges Braque. But these influences remain superficial – Piper, you feel, is too easily carried away by his own ability to create pretty illustrative effects, as in the delightful Beach with Starfish, 1934.
The influence of Picasso dominates in a series of paintings that highlight Piper’s skill in balancing shape and colour, with tightly layered vertical forms in sombre blues, reds and browns. Yet, rather than looking to Picasso’s ability to synthesise disparate forms and ideas, Piper’s paintings fasten on to just one small aspect of the master’s cubism.
It’s a joy to see some of the best-known works from his Second World War heyday, if only because they’re so redolent of their historical moment. With its wistful, nocturnal views of bomb-damaged churches, derelict country houses and deserted Georgian terraces, this was a kind of “Home Front” art, designed to rally the nation’s spirits in a time of adversity. Looking at St Mary-le-Port, Bristol, 1940, and Christ Church, Newgate Street, 1941, it’s easy to see how his merging of abstract elements and timeless British imagery gave the public a heartening sense of looking towards both the past and the future.
Yet, even in these works it’s clear that Piper’s feel for form and texture veered towards the decorative. Offering a thought-provoking introduction to Piper, rather than a full survey, this exhibition gives a sense of a talented artist whose career petered out – in works such as Brighton, Regency Square, 1949, and Portland Stone Perspective, 1954 – into an illustrative pastiche of earlier triumphs.
From an artist with almost too much technical facility for his own good, it’s a mere step into a large show on a group of artists with nothing like enough (rating: * *). The back story to Egyptian Surrealism, certainly, is fantastic: a group of young artists and writers, drawn from Cairo’s cosmopolitan elite, rejected the prevailing tendencies in pre-war Egyptian politics – Arab Nationalism and fascism – in favour of a surrealism that drew initially on the European model, but soon began to forge its own distinctive character.
But the telling of this narrative, in this show that started its international tour at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, is stiff and academic, and many of the paintings don’t measure up to its promise. Among the better artists, Kamel el-Telmissany’s dark, violent imagery brings a slight whiff of German Expressionism, while the group’s theorist Ramses Younan comes across like a sort of stripped-back Dalí, nodding – thankfully subtly – towards pharaonic imagery. But too many of the other paintings are ungainly, as in Samir Rafi’s seething river imagery, or outright kitsch, such as Mahmoud Said’s La Femme aux Boucles d’or.
The most technically proficient of the group, known simply as Mayo, was the one whose work looks most like a highly competent variant on European Surrealism. With shows like this one, which take you to little-known byways of international modernism, you’re hoping to find art that has forged its own transporting and distinctive path. On this showing, the Egyptian surrealists didn’t quite manage that.
Merging of abstract elements and timeless British imagery