Paul Nash

Adrian Edwards talks about Paul Nash and how he is an inspiration

 

Duality is the concept/ theme within this article, the representation of one thing that can be another – landscape as force, fusion, energy, transformation: such words occurs while thinking and looking at the work of the English artist Paul Nash.

 

Using the modern equivalent to a list of most important pictures, i.e. the publication ‘1001 paintings you must see before you die’ 2006, the artist Paul Nash 1889 –1945 is listed as ‘one of the most important landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century and was central to the development of the modernist movement in English/British Art.’

 

Attracted to his work over many years, especially while viewing contemporary /modernist paintings in the Tate Britain, I find his use and development of the landscape tradition and his use of certain images which are ambiguous i.e. objects that appear to be part of the landscape but are not quite what they seem to be, the dry, chalky texture of the paint surface and Nash’s links to the Neo-Romantic artists of the mid-wars period, are all of added interest. Also, an aspect which is peculiar to English landscape tradition, that of the mystic and the use of the poetic imagination and fantasy – a tradition that feeds back through artists such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Rossetti, that of print-makers and lush pen and ink images.

 

The social aspect is equally of interest. Paul was the elder of two brothers who were both artists, painting mainly landscape-based subjects. Both became War Artists during two World Wars, each producing paintings of great distinction e.g. Paul Nash ‘We are Making A New World’, and the ‘Menin Road’ to mention just two from WW1 and John Nash’s paintings ‘Over the Top: First Rifles at Marcoing’ and ‘Oppy Wood.’ Both Paul and John used a similar work process i.e. working from studies produced/drawn on site and worked up into paintings at a later stage. What is of considerable interest is the growth and development of ideas and concepts that emerged from them, especially after the 1918 period.

John proceeded to paint realist- type images of the British landscape, emerging, at a later stage, as a botanical artist/artist plants-man, much within the English art establishment of the Royal Academy. Paul, however, developed and explored in a manner that was pioneering in a broader cultural sense, promoting and extending the European styles of Modernism and Surrealism as they evolved and mutated throughout the historical period of the 1920’s and 1930’s, through to his work as a War Artist in World War 2.

 

One could argue that the two brothers represented a duality of concepts in relation to their work in the landscape. Both demonstrated a strong visual understanding, exploring the sensations of being in the landscape and producing strong emotions –the feeling for the ‘Spirit of the Place’; a genuine love and concern for the roll of the hills, the fall of a valley and the light and shadow as it moves across the shapes and forms. John was an untrained artist, whereas Paul had been allowed to attend the Slade Art School at the time of its successful second flowering of artists – Nicholson, Spencer, Gertler, Roberts, Nevinson and Wadsworth.

Yet it is a friend of Paul’s who is credited with influencing both brothers with the reasoning and key philosophy behind their art practice and endeavour.

Claughton Pellew-Harvey, as stated in a letter by John Nash 1967;

 

“He had a deep love for the country, particularly for certain of its features, such as ricks and stooks of corn. At first I was unable to understand the devotional approach to a haystack and listened doubtfully to a rhapsody on its beauty and form, slowly however, the individual beauty of certain things, trees in particular began to dawn on me”

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It is clear in Paul Nash’s paintings that there is evidence of an emphasis on close visual attention, a comprehension of the beauty, form and individuality of distinct natural forms such as trees and man-made elements e.g. hayricks, that relate back to the romantic images of Blake and Palmer. However, one major difference is that, at a later stage in Nash’s work, a range of natural forms that has deep psychological echoes replaces the place of the ruddy peasant and striving labourer.

 

Nash had, prior to this change in his work, acknowledged some of the development through his war paintings.

 

“My war experiences have developed me – certainly on the technical side. I think they have discovered my sense of colour, which was weak before the war. I have gained a greater freedom of handling due to the fact that I have made rapid sketches in dangerous places, and a greater sense of rhythm. I have been jolted”  2

 

Nash’s whole production of drawings and paintings was based on a certain way of looking, the viewing with extended intensity, the noting of the object within the landscape – that sense of place through prolonged meditation on the very elements before one’s eyes and their inner meanings. So that the recollection (the visual recall) of things and objects did not slip or collapse into a facile generalisation, it moved to another level of comprehension with the use of visual metaphor, i.e. the tree standing for mankind etc.

 

In the work of Paul Nash it is possible to examine, the meaning as to whether the landscape be tortured or not and to relate that devotional approach to a poignant and desolate landscape, as in the painting ‘We are Making a New World’. Here, the image of the undulating, constantly bombed, sodden earth’s surface, the pitiful ups and downs of soil, clearly the sight of a graveyard for so many, and yet a landscape that is devoid of human presence! Without the signs of natural growth only the remaining elements of nature, horrifyingly deflowered and broken, stretch in anguish as the tensioned trees ache, their limbs heavenwards against a blood red sky and the anguished glare of the sun. The question emerges from an artist not allowed to picture dead soldiers, ‘Are we making a New World?’

 

The experience was having a profound effect on the artist who, exclaiming in a letter home in 1917, declares;

 

“I am no longer an artist, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble and inarticulate will be my message but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls” 3

 

Soon a War artist with no war to paint, exhausted and in a poor physical state, he endeavoured to develop his art, especially that of his landscape work, to a further level. To facilitate that, he looked towards the art movements of Europe, in particular that of geometric abstraction and, later, surrealism.

 

For a period of time he explored the landscapes of England and parts of France whilst searching for fresh direction to his work, but he admitted in a letter written in 1922, that;

 

“ Our painters have never been consummately expert and accomplished virtuosi in their technique and handling of materials, so that when the great moment comes they have to think it out and feel it out from the beginning and thus get their executions into harmony with their matter and avoid ready-made solutions.”   4

 

In fact some solutions emerged, not in his visits abroad, but in the work and ideas developed in England at Dymchurch in Kent, where he was in a suitable place to explore another Romantic element of Mother Nature, the escape route, mother symbol and extreme force of nature.

Despite the fact that he was under a number of tensions, such as poor health and lacking funds - a situation that would remain that way till his death in 1945 – he was able to produce a work ‘The Winter Sea’(1922), a piece as desolate as ‘Vimy Ridge’ painted in 1918. ‘The Winter Sea’ is almost abstract, developed from sketches made from a long, flat sea wall across flat marsh and grey sea that radiates remorselessly to the horizon. In this painting it could be said we see the structured against the intuitive.

 

It was the beginning of the paintings that showed an interesting yet difficult fusing of geometric and abstract concepts with processes of careful visual analysis, depth of understanding, intellectual approach, and poetic interpretation with a draughtsman’s (rather than a colourists) technique. This enabled him to proceed to the major step of producing paintings that dealt with the archetypes of the landscape experience, being able to link and harness a fresh way of seeing the British countryside, the historic elements and those chance elements of stones and hay stooks, not in obvious, picturesque or realist painting, but in an implied, suggested way of a dreamlike state. There is a development, a subtlety, especially in contrast to tensions and horror of the war experience.

 

Nash painted a series of highly original work that explored geometric based abstraction and, later, surrealist images that locked into the landscape locations that had endured, not for decades but centuries. He articulated a sense of presence, permanence and long reaching historical elements that stretched long away to the distant past. Such physical realities of Iron Age burial mounds, Bronze Age megaliths, sites such as Stonehenge, all of which have varied and significant effect on the landscape, yet can be interpreted as having a poetic meaning and presence which can be a focus, a metaphor for mans attendance and long levity.

 

The work of Paul Nash includes a variety of media, drawings, prints, illustrations, photographs and paintings over the twenty years 1920 –1940. They are a poetic and intelligent response to the English landscape which listens to its heart beat, the vital signs of the organs as it strives to live in the time of the machine age. They examine the essence and poetry of man, not through day-to-day activities, but through the employment of visual metaphors of megaliths, corn ricks, mirrors and flowers, transposing the actual physical essence of location/place into a dream-like poetic experience that can be interpreted on a number of levels.

 

Having exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, Nash tried developing more direct methods of visually mixing together arbitrarily linked objects, as seen in paintings such as ‘Events on the Downs’ 1934, and ‘Landscape from a Dream’. Nash termed these images ‘strange meetings’. One aspect of surrealism was the approach whereby objects metamorphose into other objects. Nash, in using this device, envisioned similarities between undulating stonewall and the roll of the approaching tide, rolling hills and an encroaching sea. A fine example is seen in the painting ‘Totes Meer’ 1940-41, where the undulating mounds of wrecked and destroyed German airplanes are seen as an incoming tide, with waves of the broken stacked against an unmovable earth mound/wall.  This has echoes of the paintings produced at Dymchurch some eleven years earlier.

 

Nash’s placement as a war artist with the Air Ministry was fraught with difficulties. Lack of visual accuracy, too many demands for reference material and increasing ill health conspired to cut short the work of Paul Nash: But not until he managed to complete such master-works as ‘Battle of Britain’ 1941, and the ‘Battle of Germany’ 1944.

 

It is significant that Nash may have commenced his career as a literary artist working with a strong visual and emotional attachment to the English Landscape. Paul Nash was able to harness a range of interpretational skills and a developed comprehension of Modernist themes that enabled him to produce work of considerable emotional content with a deep-seated, intelligent, poetic core.    

 

 

References

‘John Nash ‘The delighted eye’’ Allen Freer.  Scolar Press 1993 p7

‘The Spirit of Place’ Malcolm Yorke, Constable 1988. p42 Ibid p42 Ibid p45