News Feed

Organised Visit to the John Piper Exhibition

Janice and Paul have arranged a tour of the John Piper Exhibition, being held at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick,
Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL on Friday 8^th June at 11.00am.  You will be treated to a guided tour by the Curator of the Gallery, Sarah.  The gallery is then closing for two years for refurbishment so this is a unique opportunity for everyone.  Please just turn up at 11am and enjoy!


John Piper (1903-1992) was a major contributor to the artistic and cultural landscape of twentieth century Britain.  On 15 November 1940, the day after the Coventry Blitz, Piper visited Coventry and made a series of drawings of the ravaged city, in particular of the cathedral and other gutted churches. He returned to the city in the 1950s when Basil Spence commissioned the artist, with Patrick Reyntiens, to design a huge stained glass window for the city’s new cathedral, which was consecrated in 1962. In 1962 also, construction began on Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, for which Piper and Reyntiens again designed the stained glass centrepiece.
In this, the first major exhibition of John Piper’s work since 2003, is presented a selection of works starting with the artist’s idyllic images of rural Britain in the late 1920s and 1930s through to the depictions of bombed-out churches made during World War Two as Official War Artist, as well as his romantic landscape paintings which were a preoccupation after the 1940s.