Loughborough University
Browse
John Pipers Modernist ScenographyFULLPAPER.pdf (192.15 kB)

John Piper's modernist scenography

Download (192.15 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-11, 10:22 authored by Claire WardenClaire Warden
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 Cultures

Volume

11

Issue

2

Pages

225 - 242

Citation

WARDEN, C., 2016. John Piper's Modernist Scenography. Modernist Cultures, 11(2), pp. 225 - 242.

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Version

  • 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

2016-06-30

Notes

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.2016.0136

ISSN

2041-1022

eISSN

1753-8629

Language

  • en