Jane Piper’s lyrical paintings are, as the critic Walter Thompson described, "a panoply of forms in which the rhythms and interrupting accents have the intricacy of a complex musical score." Based in Philadelphia for her whole life, Piper painted still lifes and gestural abstractions, some of which are housed in collections as esteemed as the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the National Academy of Design, New York. At both the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and the Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, the artist studied with Arthur B. Carles, a former student of Henri Matisse, as well as Hans Hofmann, who also taught Piper’s contemporary Lynne Drexler. Later in life, Piper herself became a teacher at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the mid-1950s, and then at the Philadelphia College of Art for almost 30 years.
“Jane Piper is remarkable in pushing a painting to its inherent realization, not letting it go before that. This most demanding and difficult accomplishment inspires my greatest admiration—her ability to renew her emotion, to maintain the vitality and radiance of her paintings through the many adjustments toward that ultimate end.”
—Mercedes MatterThe present work, Study II from 1956 recalls European movements like Fauvism and Cubism, as well as the compositional effects pioneered by American abstractionists of the mid-20th century. With coalescing shapes, the painting recalls one of Cézanne’s askew tabletops in brilliant hues of yellow, blue and orange. The heavy impasto resembles the built-up surfaces of Hofmann’s works, dating to around the same time. While often left out of discourse surrounding 1950s and 1960s American painting, Piper was given more than 30 solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York and other cities along the East Coast. In a new age of revisiting the canon of art history, her paintings have received renewed attention.
