Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery
By Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, 09.02.10
Paul Nash (1889-1946) created a handful of paintings that fixed
the historical moment with both an authenticity to lived experience
and formal precision. “The Ypres Salient at Night” is a defining
image of the first world war; “Totes Meer” – mangled metal torsos
of crashed bombers forming an iron sea, seen by queasy moonlight –
is the greatest English painting of the second world war. As a war
artist, Nash called himself “a messenger who will bring back word
from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on
for ever ... it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their
lousy souls”.Dulwich’s new exhibition Paul Nash: The Elements
culminates in “Totes Meer” but builds up to it in an unusual way.
The war paintings feature little; instead, a non-chronological
display explores how Nash put together his compositions using
elements derived from the natural world, then reimagined them into
weird, unquiet landscapes of the mind – his own “bitter truth”.
Early ink drawings from 1912 such as “Falling Stars” – bursts of
light dotted between curling pine branches silhouetted against a
night sky – and “The Pyramids in the Sea”, where huge calligraphic
waves attack islands of stone beneath an eclipsed moon, demonstrate
that Nash’s romantic feeling for the darkness of nature predated
the war, which only enhanced a depressive sensibility.
That sensibility found its most successful expression in works
that combine a visionary response to landscape with some dislocated
image of menace. The massive, thick tree stump with an axe stuck
into it, vastly out of proportion to the English winter countryside
around it, in “February”, is probably a symbol of death: the work
was painted just after Nash’s father died. The outsize stump recurs
here: in the melancholy watercolour “Empty Room”, in photographs
where Nash obsessively stalks objects to get the measure of them.
It is most threatening in “Event on the Downs”: an uneven, clumsy
trunk is echoed in a jagged cloud and in the craggy white Dover
cliffs, and juxtaposed with the outsize sphere of a floating tennis
ball – a painting about Englishness that shows Nash formally in his
most European, surrealist mode.
Dulwich’s approach pinpoints Nash’s very British art of
compromise, between an Anglo-centric narrative and mystical strand,
redolent of the romantic sublime of Samuel Palmer and Willam Blake,
and an openness to continental innovation. The European artist he
most recalls is Giorgio de Chirico. A giant slab of masonry in “The
End of the Steps”, a concrete block in “The Opening”, an
obstacle-like tower in “Plage”, all echo de Chirico’s incongruous
phallic towers. And claustrophobic tunnels such as “Northern
Adventure”, a surrealist take on St Pancras station, unnerving
shadows – the elongated one of a young girl in “The Archer” is a
direct quotation from de Chirico – and slightly acrid colours all
create mournful timeless effects comparable to those of the Italian
metaphysical painter.
The washed-out, reluctant colours are the greatest challenge to
enjoying Nash’s oil paintings, and the reasons why his watercolours
are often finer – the delicately balanced “Harbour and Room”, for
example. Nash transformed the sight of warships in the port at
Toulon, reflected through his window in a mirror, into a bizarre
representation of mental uncertainty – as if the sea, in a dream,
invades the actual room, yet what is real and imagined in space and
time is confused.
Among the oils, only “Winter Sea” achieves such perfect
distillation of form and feeling. The waves at dusk near Nash’s
home in Dymchurch are translated into flat triangles and parallel
shapes that acquire volume, then diminish towards infinity in icy
slow motion. Like almost every work here, it is devoid of animate
life. Only the lithograph “Marching at Night” centres on people – a
battalion trekking along a tree-lined French road, the men
simplified into a column hemmed into a tunnel of geometric blocks
that makes them look like ghosts, rising at once out of nature and
the human mind.