John Pipers Modernist ScenographyFULLPAPER.pdf (192.15 kB)
John Piper's modernist scenography
As one of the pre-eminent British painters of the twentieth century, John Piper secured his legacy with his depictions of swirling seas, grand country houses, and secluded churches. However his contribution to the theatre is less well known. This paper aims to address this lacuna, focusing on his scenographic contribution to two modernist performances: Stephen Spender's Trial of a Judge (1938) and Edith Sitwell's Façade (1942). I aim to present Piper as a vital force in a British avant-garde theatre scene and to reimagine his canon of work as inherently theatrical. This theatrical element unites his diverse oeuvre, from his most abstract geometric collages to his most quintessentially English landscapes. This paper resurrects two often overlooked performances, and sheds new light on the cross-disciplinary nature of British modernist art and the importance of theatrical motifs for a thorough understanding of Piper's work.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Modernist CulturesVolume
11Issue
2Pages
225 - 242Citation
WARDEN, C., 2016. John Piper's Modernist Scenography. Modernist Cultures, 11(2), pp. 225 - 242.Publisher
Edinburgh University PressVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016-06-30Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Modernist Cultures. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2016.0136ISSN
2041-1022eISSN
1753-8629Publisher version
Language
- en