Dimensions: support: 275 x 380 mm
Copyright: © The Piper Estate | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: John Piper's "Nude," held here at the Tate, presents a reclining figure with dynamic washes of ink and gouache. Editor: It's immediately striking – that forceful rendering of the body feels so raw, almost sculptural, and the paper seems absorbent. Curator: Piper's nudes, often set against these nebulous backgrounds, challenge traditional notions of idealised beauty. Editor: Absolutely, the stark material presence of the ink on paper, and the way the figure is built from simple marks – there's no illusionism here, just process. Curator: We might even see this as a rebellion against pre-war academic figure studies, embracing a more expressive, modern sensibility. Editor: Precisely, and the way it invites us to see the labour, the maker's hand, is itself a sort of demystification of the nude as a purely aesthetic object. Curator: It offers a potent glimpse into Piper's engagement with modernism and his reinterpretation of classical themes. Editor: I find this work compelling for its frank display of the materials, the way they reveal process and intention.
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Piper's landscapes never include people, and the figures in his stained glass designs are almost always copied from other artists, but he has always drawn from the nude. Later he also photographed nudes and from 1967 published collages of these as screenprints. This wartime drawing is unusually large for his life studies. The figure was drawn out of doors, and she is given the illumination of an extensive landscape before a storm, or even during a storm. As with Moore's carvings of reclining nudes, there is a sense that woman as source of life is a part of the structure of the earth. Gallery label, August 2004
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