Jane Piper | Vegetables in a Blue Jar | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Jane Piper (1916-1991)

An important contributor to American coloristic modernism, Jane Piper created a sophisticated oeuvre defined by experimentation with color and gesture. Her role in American art was, in part, guided by her studies with Philadelphia's premier avant-garde artists. Her first teacher of note was Grace Gemberling, a former student of influential painting teacher Arthur B. Carles. She later took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Barnes Foundation, where she had access to both the history of American painting and the important developments of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The work of both Cézanne and Matisse were important influences throughout her long career.

Outside these institutions, Piper studied privately with printmaker Earl Horter, who introduced her to Carles. Carles became an important mentor to Piper, both as an instructor and as a promoter of her work; he prompted dealer Robert Carlen to give her a solo show in 1943, the first year she began exhibiting. Carles also suggested that Piper study at Hans Hofmann's school in Provincetown, Mass., which she did in 1941. Her connection to Cape Cod was a long one; in 1964, she built a second home in Wellfleet, where she spent many summers painting.

In using prismatic color and broad strokes of pigment to define her compositions, Piper reveals the influence of her teachers as well as her debts to Cézanne and Matisse. She explored abstraction in the early part of her career, using wide patches of color to structure the space of her canvas. While her work was often highly abstracted, Piper usually based her paintings on still life and landscape, themes that she used throughout her career. Paintings from the 1940s and 1950s incorporated planes of color and were characterized by strong directional movement. In the early 1960s, Piper began creating more abstracted compositions, using blocks and broad patches of color. Shortly after, she deliberately left abstraction to pursue more representational imagery; her later style is characterized by experimentation with the color white that sets off and highlights the high key of the other colors in the composition. In this period--indeed, throughout her career--Piper used white extensively. One critic observed that "she used white in a way that made it do almost anything she wanted it to do--go back, come forward, stay still, or seem to move." (1)

Piper enjoyed a long career marked by frequent exhibitions at institutions including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Allentown Art Museum, Lehigh University, Swarthmore College, and the Woodmere Art Gallery. Her work has been the subject of numerous positive reviews and essays, particularly from the 1970s on, when she exhibited more frequently.

Although closely associated with the city of Philadelphia (where she was born and raised), Piper also lived in Harlem, Cape Cod, and Spain. It is, perhaps, her Philadelphia teaching career that so closely aligned her with the city. In the mid-1950's, Piper began teaching at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). In this way, Piper continued the lineage of high-keyed Philadelphia abstraction that she inherited.

( 1) Larry Day, quoted in Bill Scott, Jane Piper and Her Circle (Harrisburg, Pa.: The State Museum of Pennsylvania, 2000), 7.