April 2010
Monthly Archive
Paul Nash : PRIVATE VIEW
Posted by admin on 28 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: BEN LEWIS ARTICLES, BENZ TOP 3, WHAT'S HOT
Landscape of the Veneral Equinox, 1943
PAUL NASH - THE ELEMENTS
DULWICH Picture Gallery until 9 May 2010
I enter an exhibition of a British modernist full of blind optimism. Today, I imagine, a new day will dawn, when my experience of the art will overturn the consensus of generations of international art historians that British twentieth century art has always been third-rate, following far behind France, Germany and America, and possibly not much ahead of Argentina or Sweden. I hope that I will exit the gallery newly convinced that the negative views we hold against British modernism have been culturally constructed by arrogant French art critics and a certain Europhile snobbery. Francis Bacon has belatedly become recognised as an internationally important painter – who’s next? Perhaps the British Surrealist landscape painter Paul Nash (1889-1946), the subject of a comprehensive new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.The Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Nash show is an imaginatively laid out and comprehensive exhibition of Nash’s work, which avoids a conventional chronological display, and replaces them with themes, which reflects Nash’s metaphysical and surrealist interests – ’Elements in Conflict’, ’A Path Through the Elements’, ’Elements as Refuge’ and ’Elements in Harmony’.
We are greeted instantly in the exhibition by Nash’s most famous painting, an empty WWI battlefield, ”We are Making a New World.” (1918), his first major painting. This is a remarkably pared down composition in colour and structure – muddy green craters and the spikey stumps of blown-apart trees form a pattern into the distance; above the horizon, the blood-red clouds of dawn part for an abrasively white sun. The scene is back-lit. Barely a brush-stroke has been wasted. The painting has the confidence and urgency born of outrage. It’s mercifully low on sentimentality – none of the mothers and childs of Henry Moore, or the church spires of John Piper – and high on horror. This is one of Britain’s best paintings of the twentieth century – our very own Guernica. How approrpriate that the seminal war painting of modern Spain – the land of Goya and Jose de Ribera – is full of people and animals screaming in pain, while ours is about nature.
Yet, the power of this work of art lies not so much in the subject matter in itself but in its relationship to its genre. In that sense this is painting that can be read in a manner popular with contemporary art theorists: as a painting about other paintings. It looks like a picture executed in a loosely modernist Cubist-Expressionist idiom, yet not quite because that was the style that Nash chose to work in, but because the kind of landscape produced by mechanised warfare looked Expressionist-Cubist (as if those movements were a prophecy of what things would look like, not artistic styles).
The Shore (at Dymchurch) 1923
One searches the rest of this exhibition in vain for works of this iconic and prophetic quality. I didn’t leave this exhibitiion having found a Francis Bacon for the first half of the century – Nash’s dabbles too inconsistently in modernsit style sof analytic cubism, synithetci cubism and De Chirico tropes. But although the big epiphahy eludes one a distintive Nash project emerges,
Winter Sea (Dymchurch) 1925
Firstly he maintains his own unfussy modern, though not really modernist style. His palette is distinctive with its strong ochres, olive greens and sky blues. The brushwork is a delight – economical, dedicated to describing forms rather than real things, full of the joyous textures of the paintbrush, and characterised by his concise stub-like strokes.
Event on the Downes 1934
As many art historians have noted, Nash developed a distinctively British version of surrealism, wedded to the British landscape – as Graham Sutherland and the rather overlooked Edward Wadsworth also did. Nature was exterior and interior a description of the psyche of the artist using symbols and clues. This much we know.
Monster Field, 1938
Beyond this however, there is something peculiarly contemporary about Nash’s paintings, which suggests that British artists, in their prosaic realism anticipated a certain mood in art today. A revelatory room of Nash’s fascinating, though not always brilliant photographs offer a clue – a crumbling old pier, a derelict mineshaft or set of stone steps in a field . Nash was not just interested in the British landscape: he liked enigmatic man-made structures, which were something less than architecture., their purpose unclear or obscured by the framing of his composition.
”The End of the Steps” 1922 is an odd scene from the village of Dymchurch in Kent, where he spent the early 1920s, recovering from the trauma of the war. Its focus is a curious block of masonry (a bunker, or fortress?), around which are geometric arrangements of stone steps and wooden fencing.
In ”Pillar and Moon” (1932-40), an old classical pillar – perhaps one half of a gateway? - stands curiously foregrounded against a low stone wall and the sweep of an avenue of trees.In the ”The Archer”(1930) Nash creates his own bizarre scenography out of an assemblage (the term for sculptures made from found materials, invented by Picasso) and objets trouvés, and then paints it. He placed a sail boat on its side, so its mast faces a mill wheel- an image with patent sexual symbolism – in his back yard. The sun throws long shadows, including one from a girl who is in the foreground out of the picture frame.
Of course it’s all terribly De Chirico, but there are also three eerily contemporary qualities to the work. Firstly, the impetus for these kind of works can be understood as an eccentric British search – evident in ”We are making a New World” – for real scenes that resembled modernist styles – a reversal of what they were doing in Europe, yet a strategy that is widely used by contemporary artists today. Secondly, Nash, like many photographers of the last twenty years, is interested in the human narratives that can be read in empty architectural setting and unpeopled views. Hence another, though less recognised war masterpiece, Totes Meer” (1940-41).
Paul Nash: Private View By Ben Lewis
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