A week or so ago, we were in an antique shop in Aberystwyth when a framed, limited-edition, lino-cut print poster hanging on the wall caught our eye; it was signed, ‘Paul Peter Piech’. We’d never heard of the artist, so I made a note of the name to check him out when we returned home.
Paul Peter Piech (1920-1996) was a Brooklyn-born artist of Ukrainian parentage. As a GI during the 2nd World War, he’d been posted to Cardiff. Whilst there, he met his future wife, Irene Tompkins. She didn’t fancy the idea of moving to the US, so they remained in the UK, eventually settling in Wales.
Piech’s posters were often on the subjects of equality, justice, human rights, anti-war, anti-racism, the environment and jazz. His artworks were regularly set with quotes from pre-eminent poets and orators such as Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, John F. Kennedy, Harri Webb and Walt Whitman.
In 1959, Piech founded the Taurus Press of Willow Dene in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire. It printed limited-edition books on poetry by the likes of William Blake, Hugo Manning, John Donne, John Cotton, Neil Spratling and Graham Searle. He provided the accompanying illustrations for these publications.
In the 1980s, Piech donated in excess of 2,500 prints and posters to the V&A’s permanent collection. After his death, his family donated an extensive portfolio of his later work to the Regional Print Centre and Art & Design department at Yale College, Wrexham.
Because of his abundance of production (and despite the small print runs), his works are fairly easy to come by; original prints and posters can be found at auction or on eBay and Etsy. Books by and about him can be found on Amazon and Hive.
I’ve been called a Fascist. I’ve been called a Communist. I’ve been called a racist. I’ve been called everything after any of my shows happen because of certain posters, you see. But they can’t pin me down to any ‘isms… I just look at humanity the way it is and then I make a graphic expression of it. The purpose of graphic expression is to realize some truth that they’re missing and to do something about it… I don’t want to sit around and be silent.
Paul Peter Piech
