Paul Nash at the Tate

The wonderful Paul Nash exhibition at the Tate Britain in London is currently on at the moment, and is a great introduction to the work of this very English and rather mystical artist.

This is an exhibition which takes you through the lyrical, Georgic drawings of his early years (during which his home life involved his mother dying in a mental institution in 1910), and his repetative, comfort drawings of a family group of trees.  

Paul Nash fought in the First World War, later acting as a War Artist.  Here he is in uniform in 1918.

          Paul Nash by Bassano Ltd whole-plate glass negative, 29 April 1918 (c) National Portrait Gallery

However, whilst he was invalided out after a fall in the trenches, his entire battalion of the Artists Rifles were killed. Not surprisingly, this affected him very much mentally (causing a breakdown in 1921).  His huge, stunning canvas The Menin Road, is in the exhibition, and its stark, barren vision is immensely striking.

Paul Nash, The Menin Road (Oil on canvas, 1919)

After the war, in 1921, the year of his mental breakdown, he became fixated with the geometry of the landscape.  He painted nature by means of Cezanne's  cylinder, sphere and cone,the cube which he saw naturally appearing in the landscape in the form of giant anti-tank blocks of concrete or man-made groynes.  

Paul Nash, The Shore at Dymchurch (Oil on canvas, 1923)

His most famous work is perhaps a Second World War picture,  Totes Meer, an eerie painting which looks like an abstract  sea of metal waves in the landscape.   

(There's a great little film about Totes Meer here.  )

In fact, as this film and a series of photographs that he took show, Nash was merely painting what he saw, namely a dump of wrecked second world war enemy aircraft near Cowley in Oxfordshire.  

This is perhaps the key to Nash's work - his paintings often look surreal, but in fact they are super-real, they are super-observed.  His chalky, strange, very English landscapes remind me of work by Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Eric Gill.  They are ordered and ancient and pastoral, and yet there is something tortured writhing beneath the surface.

 Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Oil on canvas, 1941)

The last room sadly doesn't have The Battle of Britain, which I'd hoped to see

but it does have a strange sense of floating and flying in the paintings very much like the final room of the recent Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern, where she painted abstract scenes of clouds observed from above.  It's almost like a precursor of death.  

In this room are some of Nash's last series of sunflower paintings (a flower symbolic of life and death), which return to his love of William Blake, being based on his 1794 poem Ah! Sun-flower.

Paul Nash, The Eclipse of the Sunflower (Oil on canvas 1945)

Nash died of heart failure in 1946, and is buried with this stone carving of a hawk on his grave, which he has painted 10 years earlier.

Paul Nash, Landscape from a Dream (Oil on canvas 1936)

Now, as much as I loved the show, there is an annoying thing with moderncurators.  The exhibition is often about curating and the curators more than it is about the artists.  

So here, the agenda is not to introduce Nash to an audience who haven't seen his work, or to showcase him as a war artist, but to present Nash as an 'international modernist painter'.  Which means they dispense with any sort of introduction to the man, as if the paintings spontaneously appear on their own, and that the life of an artist doesn't reflect in and inform the work.  

So, no need to give us a picture of the man, or tell about when he was born, or how he was brought up, or his family, or his mother's illness, or his own mental breakdown, or his lack of personal relationships.  Nope. 'Paul Nash was a key figure in debates about British art's relationship to international modernism' we are told.  What a load of alientating elitist nonsense.  

Which begs the question, just who is this show aimed at?  

People who never been to an art show before? 

People with an interest in art who just want to see something interesting and a bit challenging for an afternoon?

People who have never seen the work of Paul Nash?  

People who perhaps know one aspect of his work, but want to learn more about him?

Experts who are so up on Paul Nash that they would be insulted if you even hinted at any biographical insights?  

Other curators?  

I suspect it's the latter.

So do go to the show - but to get the best out of it, read up on Paul Nash's life and times beforehand. 

Looking Forward...

I thought I'd kick-start the year by looking forward to a couple of block-bustin' shows which are on during 2016.

The first is PAINTING THE MODERN GARDEN: MONET TO MATISSE at the Royal Academy in London. 

 Claude Monet, Water Lilies (Oil on canvas, 1914-15)

It opens on 30 January and runs until 20 April, and using the work of Monet as a starting point, will be looking at the role that gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s through to the 1920s. 

 

This was of course a period of great social change and innovation in the arts, covering movements of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Avant-Garde, so hopefully this is going to be a show which is about something more art-historically meaty than just selling stacks of pretty fridge magnets in the exhibition shop.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau The Garden II (Oil on canvas, 1910) 

As well as Monet, who once said he owed his painting “to flowers”, there are over 120 works, including ones by Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, Manet, Sargent, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Matisse, Klimt and Klee.

However, I'm looking forward to the monumental Agapanthus Triptych, which has been reunited specifically for the exhibition.

Claude Monet, Waterlilies (Agapanthus) (Oil on canvas, 1915-26)

  

Painted only 14 years later is this picture, which is going to feature in a major show at the Tate Britain.  Like Monet's waterlilies, the painting below is both natural and abstract, and is also produced during a world war.  But if you look closely, the waves of the 'sea' are the ghostly wings of abandoned, skeletal aircraft.  Monet is calm and content, but this is eerie and disquieting.

Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Dead Sea) (Oil on canvas, 1940-41)

The exhibition is  PAUL NASH (26 October 2016 – 5 March 2017).  Nash is one of the most distinctive and important British artists of the twentieth century and this will be the largest presentation of his work for a generation.

Known as a landscape artist, specifically of the rolling downland and chalky coast of southern England, these landscapes became surrealist stages for strange unspoken scenes, full of mysticism and symbolism from an ancient past, and of the natural phases of nature.

Works are arranged chronologically in the exhibition (hurrah!) in themes (hurrah again!!) such as the Symbolist landscapes, war landscapes, coastal scenes, objects, Surrealism, megaliths and cycles of nature.  (Yes, keep is simple, Mr Curator.  Don't knock the obvious approach to presenting an artist's work - it's not about you, it's about them. )

These themes draw out Nash’s concept of ‘unseen landscapes’ and how this enabled him to interpret the English landscape in a way that made connections between modernism and tradition. Central to Nash’s work was the idea of a life force in inanimate objects ranging from traces of human impact on the landscape such as monoliths and abandoned architectural features to trees, stones and found natural objects.

In the 1930s and 1940s Nash experimented with photography, collage, and assemblage as well as painting. Compare this photo below with Totes Meer above.

Paul Nash, Wrecked Aircraft, Cowley Dump (Black and white negative, 1940) (c) Tate  

His work was particularly close to that opf Eileen Agar in these years, and her work will be shown alongside his in the exhibition to show connections between the two, as well as work by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

Let joy fill my heart.