Paul Nash (artist)

Paul Nash (11 May 1889 – 11 July 1946) was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.

Born in London, Nash grew up in Buckinghamshire where he developed a love of the landscape. He entered the Slade School of Art but was poor at figure drawing and concentrated on landscape painting. Nash found much inspiration in landscapes with elements of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire. The artworks he produced during World War I are among the most iconic images of the conflict. After the war Nash continued to focus on landscape painting, originally in a formalized, decorative style but, throughout the 1930s, in an increasingly abstract and surreal manner. In his paintings he often placed everyday objects into a landscape to give them a new identity and symbolism.

During World War II, although sick with the asthmatic condition that would kill him, he produced two series of anthropomorphic depictions of aircraft, before producing a number of landscapes rich in symbolism with an intense mystical quality.

Early life

Nash was the son of a successful barrister, William Harry Nash, and his wife Caroline Maude, the daughter of a Captain in the Royal Navy. He was born in Kensington and grew up in Earl's Court in West London, but in 1902 the family moved to Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. It was hoped the move to the countryside would help Caroline Nash, who was increasingly showing symptoms of mental illness. The growing cost of Caroline Nash's treatment led to the house at Iver Heath being rented out while Paul and his father lived together in lodgings and his younger sister and brother went to boarding schools. On Valentine's Day 1910, aged forty-nine, Caroline Nash died in a mental institution.

Paul Nash was originally intended for a career in the navy, following the path of his maternal grandfather, but despite additional training at a specialist school in Greenwich, he failed the Naval Entrance Examination and returned to finish his schooling at St Paul's School. Encouraged by a fellow student at St Paul's, Eric Kennington, Nash considered the possibility of a career as an artist.

The Slade was then opening its doors to a remarkable crop of young talents – what Tonks later described as the school's second and last 'Crisis of Brilliance'. Nash's fellow students included Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Dora Carrington, C. R. W. Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Nash struggled with figure drawing, and spent only a year at the school.

World War I

Army officer

thumb|Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 (1918), collection of the [[Imperial War Museum, London]]

On 10 September 1914, shortly after the start of World War I, Nash reluctantly enlisted in the Territorial Force as a private for home service. Initially he served with the Artists' Rifles, formally the 28th (County of London) Battalion of the London Regiment. Nash's duties, which included guard duty at the Tower of London, allowed him time to continue drawing and painting.

In December 1914 Nash married Jerusalem-born Margaret Theodosia Odeh, an Oxford-educated campaigner for Women's Suffrage, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Her father, Revd Naser Odeh, who was born in Palestine and educated at Monkton Combe School, had been the founding priest in charge of St Mary's Mission and the pro-cathedral, Cairo. Margaret was naturalised British in 1912. The couple had no children.

Nash began officer training in August 1916 and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. However, on the night of 25 May 1917, Nash fell into a trench, broke a rib and, by 1 June, had been invalided back to London. A few days later the majority of his former unit were killed in an assault on a position known as Hill 60. the literary magazine BLAST, the majority concerned the spring landscape and were similar in tone to his pre-war work. Chaos Decoratif, for example, shows part of a trench and a shattered tree amid a scene of almost pastoral calm. As a result of these exhibitions, C. R. W. Nevinson advised Nash to approach Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau, to apply to become an official war artist. Nash was with a reserve battalion near Portsmouth, preparing to return to France in a combat role, when he received word that his commission as a war artist had been approved.

Nash's anger was a great creative stimulus which led him to produce up to a dozen drawings a day. He worked in a frenzy of activity and took great risks to get as close as possible to the frontline trenches. Despite the dangers and hardship, when the opportunity came to extend his visit by a week and work for the Canadians in the Vimy sector, Nash jumped at the chance. He eventually returned to England on 7 December 1917.

Whilst in France Nash had made a pen-and-ink drawing he called Sunrise, Inverness Copse. Inverness Copse was the site of heavy fighting in the summer of 1917 during the Battle of Langemarck, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and Nash depicts the aftermath of the fighting, showing a landscape consisting of mud and blasted trees illuminated by a pale yellow Sun. Early in 1918, when Nash decided to produce a larger oil painting based on this drawing, whatever little hope that pale Sun represented had vanished. The bitter title, We are Making a New World, clearly mocks the ambitions of the war but is also a more universal reference than the previous title and represents a scene of devastation that could be anywhere on the Western Front. There are no people in the picture nor any of the details of, for example, The Mule Track to distract from the broken tree stumps, shellholes and mounds of earth. The Sun is a cold white orb and the brown clouds of the original drawing have become blood red. One modern critic, writing in 1994, likened it to a 'nuclear winter' whilst one of the first people to see it in 1918, Arthur Lee, the official censor responsible for the British war artists, thought it was a 'joke' at the expense of the public and the art establishment.

These new works, alongside the 1917 pieces and some other works such as Mackerel Sky, were exhibited in Nash's solo exhibition entitled The Void of War at the Leicester Galleries in May 1918. This exhibition was critically acclaimed with most commentators focusing on how Nash had portrayed nature, in the form of devastated woods, fields and hillsides, as the innocent victim of the war. The picture depicts a maze of flooded trenches and shell craters while tree stumps, devoid of any foliage, point towards a sky full of clouds and plumes of smoke bisected by shafts of sunlight resembling gun barrels. Two soldiers at the centre of the picture attempt to follow the now unrecognisable road itself but appear to be trapped by the landscape.

1920s

When the war ended Nash was determined to continue his career as an artist but struggled with periodic bouts of depression and money worries. Throughout 1919 and 1920 Nash lived in Buckinghamshire and in London where he made theatre designs for a play by J. M. Barrie. Along with several other artists, Nash became prominent in the Society of Wood Engravers and in 1920 was involved in its first exhibition. From 1920 until 1923 Nash taught, on an occasional basis, at the Cornmarket School of Art in Oxford.

Dymchurch and Iden

In 1921, after visiting his sick father, Nash collapsed and, after a week during which he repeatedly lost consciousness, was diagnosed as suffering from 'emotional shock' arising from the war. The conflict between land and sea depicted in the seawall paintings at Dymchurch recalled elements of Nash's paintings on the Western Front and were also influenced by his grief at the death of his friend Claud Lovat Fraser in June 1921. In 1922, Nash produced Places, a volume of seven wood engravings for which he designed the cover, cut the lettering and wrote the text. At this time he also began painting floral still-lifes as well as continuing his landscape paintings, most notably with Chilterns under Snow in 1923.

Northern Adventure and Nostalgic Landscape, St Pancras Station both paintings of St Pancras Station seen through a lattice work of abstract elements, derived from the frame of an advertising hoarding.
Nash completed Dead Spring in February 1929, immediately after the death of his father. The painting shows a dying pot plant on a window still surrounded by a lattice of geometrical shapes which include some draughtsman's tools. Like the painting Lares, Dead Spring is thought to show the influence on Nash of having seen the 1928 Giorgio de Chirico exhibition in London.

In 1921 Nash displayed textile designs at an exhibition at Heal's and in 1925 developed four fabric designs for the Footprints series sold by Modern Textiles in London. Later still, in 1933, Brain & Co in Stoke-on-Trent commissioned Nash and other artists to produce designs for their Foley China range which was showcased at the Modern Art for the Table exhibition at Harrods. In 1931, Margaret Nash gave him a camera when he sailed to America to serve as a jury member at the Carnegie International Award in Pittsburgh. Nash became a prolific photographer and would often work from his own photographs alongside his preparatory sketches when painting a work. Nash became a pioneer of modernism in Britain, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and surrealism throughout the 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement Unit One with fellow artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth and the critic Herbert Read. It was a short-lived but important move towards the revitalisation of British art in the inter-war period.

Avebury

When in 1931 he was invited to illustrate a book of his own choice, Nash choose Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, providing the publisher with a set of 30 illustrations to accompany Browne's discourses.

For Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial Nash also produced six larger watercolours, including Mansions of the Dead, and three oil paintings on the book's themes of death and burial customs. These became significant themes for Nash when in July 1933 he went to Marlborough on holiday and visited Silbury Hill and Avebury for the first time. This ancient landscape with its neolithic monuments and standing stones "excited and fascinated" Nash and stirred "his sensitiveness to magic and the sinister beauty of monsters" according to Ruth Clarke who had accompanied him to Marlborough. Nash appears to have been unhappy with the restoration work, started in 1934, at Avebury by Alexander Keiller, seemingly preferring the previous wilder and more unkept appearance of the area.

Nash's father in law Naser Odeh died in Rye in 1932 and Nash was named an executor, together with his wife Margaret. Nash wanted to move to live in Wiltshire but instead he left Rye for London in November 1933 before the couple undertook a long trip to France, Gibraltar and North Africa. When they returned to England in June 1934, the Nashes rented a cottage on the Dorset coast near Swanage. Nash was asked by the poet John Betjeman to write a book in the Shell Guides series. Nash accepted and undertook writing a guide to Dorset.

Swanage

Between 1934 and 1936 Nash lived near Swanage in Dorset, hoping the sea air would ease his asthma whilst he worked on the Shell Guide to Dorset.

He produced a considerable number of paintings and photographs during this period, some of which he used in the guide book. The guide was published in 1935 and featured some peculiarities of landscape and architecture that are often overlooked. Nash found Swanage with its diverse flora and fauna, fossils and geology to have certain Surrealist qualities. In a 1936 essay, entitled Swanage or Seaside Surrealism, he wrote that the place had something "of a dream image where things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place." Whilst there Nash met the artist Eileen Agar. The two began a relationship, which lasted some years, and also collaborated on a number of works together. In Swanage, Nash produced some notable surrealist works such as Events on the Downs, a picture of a giant tennis ball and a tree trunk seemingly embarking on a journey together and, later, Landscape from a Dream, a cliff-top scene with a hawk and mirror. For a collage of black and white photographs entitled Swanage, Nash depicts objects found in, or connected to, locations around Dorset within a surrealist landscape. In 1939, shortly after World War II began, the Nashes left Hampstead and moved to Oxford.

World War Two

thumb|The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park (1940), [[Tate]]

thumb|Defence of Albion (1942), collection of the Imperial War Museum, London

thumb|[[Battle of Britain (painting)|Battle of Britain (1941), collection of the Imperial War Museum, London]]

At the start of World War Two Nash was appointed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee to a full-time salaried war artist post attached to the Royal Air Force and the Air Ministry. Nash was unpopular with the Air Ministry representative on the WAAC committee, partly because of the modernist nature of his work and partly because the RAF wanted the WAAC artists to concentrate on producing portraits of their pilots and aircrew. Whilst still a salaried WAAC artist Nash produced two series of watercolours, Raiders and Aerial Creatures. Raiders, or Marching Against England, was a set of studies of crashed German aircraft set in English rural landscapes with titles such as Bomber in the Corn, The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park and Under the Cliff. Whilst the Air Ministry could appreciate the patriotic intent and propaganda value of those works, the Aerial Creatures series, with its anthropomorphic depictions of British aircraft, displeased the Air Ministry so much they insisted Nash's full-time contract was ended in December 1940. The Chairman of WAAC, Kenneth Clark was aghast at this development and in January 1941 the Committee agreed to put aside £500 to purchase works from Nash on the theme of aerial conflict. The painting recalls a series of bleak sea and coastal paintings Nash made in the 1930s. Although the aircraft dump at Cowley contained many British planes, Nash only depicted German aircraft because he wished to show the fate of the 'hundreds and hundreds of flying creatures which invaded these shores'. He used the German title for the picture as he wanted it included in a series of postcards of crashed German planes he suggested be dropped over the Reich as propaganda. To this end Nash even created a postcard of the painting with Hitler's head superimposed on the wrecked aircraft.

Battle of Britain (1941) is an imaginative representation of an aerial battle in progress over a wide landscape of land and sea, suggesting the Thames Estuary and the English Channel. The white vapour trails of the Allied aircraft form patterns resembling buds and petals and appear to be growing naturally from the land and clouds, in contrast to the rigid, formal ranks of the attacking forces. Clark recognised the allegorical nature of the work and wrote to Nash, "I think in this and Totes Meer you have discovered a new form of allegorical painting. It is impossible to paint great events without allegory... and you have discovered a way of making the symbols out of the events themselves." Despite being given access to official reports and accounts from aircrews who had flown on raids to Germany, for the Battle of Germany, Nash adopted an unconventional abstract approach. Nash explained that it showed a city under attack with a pillar of smoke from burning buildings in the background and the white spheres of descending parachutes in the foreground. The pillar of smoke and the moon were as threatening to the city as the bombers, concealed within the red clouds, responsible for the explosions on the right side of the painting. Whilst Kenneth Clark found the painting difficult to understand because of what he called the "different planes of reality in which it is painted", Another place in South Oxfordshire that Nash visited and revisited and found inspirational in his study of the Moon was the hamlet of Ascott. There he began in 1932 and completed in 1942 his painting Pillar and Moon, which explored "the mystical association of two objects which inhabit different elements and have no apparent relation in life...the pale stone sphere on top of a ruined pillar faces its counterpart the moon, cold and pale and solid as stone".

The completion of Battle of Germany in September 1944 brought Nash's public commitments to an end and he spent the remaining eighteen months of his life in, by his own words, "reclusive melancholy". Nash also returned to the influence of William Blake that had so affected his early art, for example in the series of gigantic sunflowers including Sunflower and Sun (1942), Solstice of the Sunflower (1945) and Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945), based on Blake's 1794 poem "Ah! Sun-flower".

Death

During the final ten days of his life Nash returned to Dorset and visited Swanage, Corfe, Worth Matravers and Kimmeridge Bay. A memorial exhibition and concert for Nash, attended by the then Queen Elizabeth, was held at the Tate Gallery in March 1948. His widow Margaret died in 1960 and the couple are buried together in Langley.

Legacy and works on public display

Works by Nash are held in the collections of the Aberdeen Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Beaverbrook Art Gallery,

Bolton Art Gallery, Brighton & Hove Museums, Cleveland Museum of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums, Imperial War Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, National Museums Liverpool, Tate Gallery, The Huntington Library, The Priseman Seabrook Collection, Royal Air Force Museum London, Whitworth Art Gallery, The Norfolk Museums Collection and Wichita Art Museum. In 1980 a catalogue raisonné, by Andrew Causey, was published by Clarendon Press.

In 2016 English artist Dave McKean published Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, a graphic novel about Nash's life and work.

Paul Nash, a major exhibition of his work at Tate Britain in London, ran from October 2016 until 5 March 2017, then moving to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich from April to August 2017.

Bibliography

1922: Places, Weidenfeld – text and wood-engravings
1924: Genesis, Nonesuch Press – a book of wood-engravings
1932: Room and Book, Soncino Press, London – essays on contemporary design
1935: Shell Guide to Dorset, Architectural Press – with Archibald Russell
1949: Outline – a partial autobiography, first published posthumously in 1949 and re-issued in 2016

References

External links

Paul Nash's Work – Imperial War Museum
Works by Paul Nash at The Royal Air Force Museum London.
Tate Archive: Negatives of 1267 photographs taken by Paul Nash 1930–46