Two Wars Enclosed Him

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 374, 23 August 1946, Page 20

Two Wars Enclosed Him

Paul Nash Stands High Among English Painters

LL LAS Ae enestenne PAUL. NASH, one of Britain's best-known artists, died last month, The tribute to him which we reprint below was paid by the critic Eric Newton in a BBC Pacific Service talk re-broadcast the other evening by 2Y A. SS

EN Paul Nash died three weeks ago at the age of 57 England lost one of her greatest artists. I could easily have said her greatest artist, but it is for posterity to make judgments of that kind. During a man’s lifetime noone can possibly estimate the exact importance of his contribution and immediately after his death it is still more difficult, especially if one not only admired him as an artist, but also knew him as a man, But perhaps I am taking tog much for granted in assuming that you who are listening to me on the other side of the world have even heard of him. Thére are plenty of great artists who are known only to their own countrymen and to a handful of enthusiasts scattered up and down the world who make it their business to find out what’s happening in their own particular sphere. Of course there are artists whose names are household words wherever one goes--Epstein for example. But that’s not so much because they are great men, though they certainly are, as because their work is sensational and always arouses violent controversy. Paul Nash was never a sensational artist. He worked steadily, he worked quietly, he aroused no passions, he was not even a revolutionary. His admirers were many, but he was never a popular painter. For that very reason I feel sure that his reputation wiil increase rather than diminish as time goes on. For the artist who depends on an appeal to fashionable taste must inevitably lose his appeal when fashion changes. But before I describe his work, before I try to explain just what! he did achieve during the 30-odd years of. his active career as a painter, let me give you one or two biographical details. War Artist in 1917 He was born in London in 1889, and educated at a public school. He was destined for the Navy, but luckily never arrived at that destination. He began to study art at the Chelsea Polytechnic and later went to the Slade Schodl. In 1913 he held a small joint exhibition of landscape drawings and water colours in London with his artist brother, John Nash. The critics liked it, but it attracted little public attention. Then came the. war of 1914-1918. He enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, and later obtained a commission in the Hampshire Regiment, saw active service in France, accidentally broke a rib, and was invalided home. During his convaléscence he exhibited a series of drawings he had made in the trenches, and as a result of the interest aroused by them, he was appointed Official War Artist on the Western ,Front by the Foreign Office. Only one month -the month of October, 1917-was

spent in making these official records, but that month was the turning point ! in his career. The exhibition of his war pictures held at the Leicester Galleries proved that he had genius. That was recognised at once. He was commissioned to paint a huge picture of the: Western Front for the Imperial War Museum. After the war he divided his time bes: tween painting, designing for the theatre, designing textiles, and doing book illustrations in woodcut. Then bad health compelled him. to travel to the South of France. But his roots were in England and his work is always a reflection or an interpretation of England. He held a series of one-man exhibitions in London in 1924, 1925, 1927, and 1928. : Aeroplanes Fascinated Him In 1933 he wa$S a moving spirit in forming a group of the most experimen-~-tal artists and architects among his contemporaries. Its mame was Unit I. It was short-lived, but it marked him out as a leader-a leader in his own genera-: tion-and as a rebel against the academic spirit in art. Painting absorbed him. His work became more and more assured and more and more personal. The war of 1939-1945 found him, ready to play his part again as an offi‘cial" war-artist. This time it was not the. trenches, not the shell-torn surface of the land that interested him, but the more dynamic struggle in the air. Aeroplanes, shattered and maimed in battle or alert and purposeful in action. Aeroplanes fascinated him and he managed to interpret in his art an aspect of modern warfare that one would have. thought was quite beyond the scope of the painter. He had just left the war behind ~ him and he was just resuming his old intimate contact with the English countryside when he died on July 12. Those are the bare facts. They suggest an uneventful, even-a monotonous life, but superficial monotony is always a mark of a steady, purposeful man who knows what he wants and refuses to pursue _will-o’-the-wisps. Nash never suffered either from the struggle that comes from neglect or from the pride that. comes from a too-easy success. What he achieved was on the whole achieved under enviable conditions. What then did he achieve? What is it that makes his work important, not merely among his contemporaries but also as a landmark in the history of British art? That is never an easy question to answer to an audience, especially . to one which may not be acquainted with the artist’s work. Elusive Quality _ If. you ave never seen a drawing by Blake, or a picture by Turner it would be difficult to describe in words just (continued on next page) \

(continued from previous page) where their genius lies. In Paul Nash’s case the difficulty is even greater because he was more elusive, more subtle than they. But he was not unrelated to them; he belonged to their family. He has some of Blake’s visionary power and some of Turner’s poetic insight into the moods of nature. Imagine him looking at a landscape, not for the sake of its superficial beauties but for the sake of° its hidden drama; living in a kind of primeval world uninhabited by human beings, but intensely inhabited by rocks and trees and stone walls and breaking waves, all of which seemed to develop a life of their own as he looked at them -so that the trees seemed to speak to each other, the stones to possess their own individual personalities. That was the world that he painted. No wonder that his pictures of the Western Front are so tragic and so remarkable, for the very earth had been violated and the trees had been splintered and maimed. A sordid chaos of broken and abandoned objects met his eye, And his pictures of that bitter landscape were like dramas in which the actors were things instead of people. No one had ever seen a war like that before. His first pictures revealed something new and they fixed it forever in one’s imagination and in one’s emory. Those were his earliest and his ost violent paintings but they were not necessarily his best. For Paul Nash had no need to be confronted by destruction before he could see the underlying drama of nature. He was a gentle soul. There was enough drama for him in the decay of autumn, or the undulating line of a stone wall running along a hillside. Between Two Wars , But it so happened that his career began with one world war and ended with another. Consequently his first pictures and his last were his most forceful though not his most penetrating or his most typical. Between the wars he developed gradually and in a series of well-defined steps his poetic imagination, his poetic interpretation of inanimate

nature; and with each subject~he developed a slightly new technique ‘and a slightly new kind of formal design to express a new poetical adventure that he was engaged on. For example, while he was living near the sea at Dymchurch on the South Coast, the long lines of the breaking waves, the harsh forms of the jetties thrusting out into the sea gave the pictures of that period a rigid angular pattern, almost like abstract art. Or, after coming across certain prehistoric

stones at Avebury, a new aspect of nature presented itself, and he began to study the odd sculptural surfaces of stone with such an intensity that for him stones became as significant a subject for a picture as a group of people was to Hogarth. And . then as his imagination took wing he began to experiment with juxtapositions ‘and _ arrangements of things that could happen only in the world of dreams. There ' is a picture of his called "The Mansions of the Dead" in which a great scaffolding stretches away into the middle of infinite space while little birds , imprisoned in transparent globes fluttered in and out of this aerial architecture. Or I remember another picture called "Northern Adventure" that suggests or represents the formidable approach to St. Pancras station as seen from a@

room which he occupied for a short time on the opposite side of the Euston Road. Nothing could be more haunted than that picture with its flight of steps and that dark doorway that seems to beckon one into it. And the window itself through which Paul Nash looked at the station is painted in the top right corner and set at an angle as if it were craning its own neck to take in the scene. Well, you can pass St. Pancras station twice a day every day without ever seeing it as anything but a noisy railway terminus, but once you have seen "Northern Adventure" it never looks the same again-you see it through nature’s eyes. Intuitive Surrealism In that phase of his art Paul Nash comes very near to the surrealist. He eis walking on the fringes of the dream world, but his was never the brutal portrayal of the dream world which out-and-out surrealists indulge in. His was the intuitive surrealism of the poet. In order to show you how his mind worked, let me quote from one of his essays, He wrote well and was not afraid of analysing himself. This quotation is from the manifesto of Unit I. published in 1934: "Last summer,’ he wrote, "I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up 16 feet high, miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, relics of the avenue of stones that led to the great circle. A mile away a green pyramid casts a gigantic shadow. In the hedge at hand the white trumpet of the convolvulus turns on its spiral stem following the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation." You see perhaps what I mean when I say that Paul Nash did not need stimulus of violence in order to see tie drama of the inanimate world. Anyone could have looked at the scene which Nash described and many people would have

been impressed by what they would call its beauty. But who else would have thought of it as an equation to be solved by painting a picture. His pictures of the war that has just ended were full of the same penetrating poetry. One in particular stands out and will, I think, prove to be one of the most significant pictures of the century. It is called "Totes Meer, Dead Sea." It represents, quite realistically, the huge dump of German wrecked aeroplanes that sprawled across the ground at Oxford just after the Battle of Britain, but the twisted wreckage is writhing about in rhythmic pattern like breaking waves. Nash had remembered the breakers of his early years at Dymchurch, and made a new picture-but one with a different meaning, a deeper meaning. That picture will be remembered because it sums up one of the great moments of British history and only Paul Nash could have summed it up in just that way.