In the end, with Paul Nash's art, the question is: do you
believe? I'm not saying that you can only enjoy it, if you do. Most
of his fans don't. The artist himself possibly didn't. He was first
and last an artist. Still, the work is so spellbinding, it raises a
question of belief. It goes beyond symbolism, beyond a theatrical
shiver. It asks you, quite seriously: do you believe in ghosts?
Ghosts. All right, it's not the right word. I don't mean
something white and flitting, or an armoured man with his head held
under his arm. The presences in Nash-world are something far less
defined and less definable. It is haunted all through. Or that's
partly it. But I'm not sure that even Nash found the right words
for his spell.
In his essay "The Life of the Inanimate Object", he wrote about
"the endowment of natural objects, organic but not human, with
powers or personal influences..." The hills are alive - and the
rocks and stones and trees are too! Yes, with any English outdoor
art, especially one that is set in a handful of favourite
locations, these Wordsworthian terms are going to be tempting.
But go to the show that opens in Dulwich Picture Gallery on
Wednesday - Paul Nash: the Elements. The powers that dwell in these
landscapes don't feel like quasi-persons. Nature doesn't wear a
human face. When Nash's work is at strength, it's as if another and
quite alien world had intersected with this one; as if the hills
etc had been taken away and then returned, subtly changed.
Nash belonged to the very diverse generation of British modern
artists who went to the Slade and included Wyndham Lewis, Stanley
Spencer, Ben Nicholson, Dora Carrington. But you might wonder how
far Nash needed to learn anything. Take almost the first work in
this show, a drawing called The Pyramids in the Sea, done in 1912,
when he was 23. Two pyramids, by moonlight, emerge from a turbulent
sea. It's all there already. It's one of those mystifying early
works that seem to hold a whole career in embryo, and to anticipate
later influences.
Years before there was such a thing as Surrealism, this image
finds a power in deep strangeness. Years before Nash had seen a
Samuel Palmer (who only resurfaced in the 1920s) this image has a
Samuel Palmer moon and a Samuel Palmer sea - that is, if Palmer had
ever done a stormy sea. The waves rise in massive bell curves. And
in those waves, Nash first finds the swelling-dipping forms that
will provide him with hills for the rest of his work.
In a more agitated way, these same curves make the churned-up
trench-scape in his First World War horror-masterpiece, We Are
Making a New World. They are still there, the background hills, in
the late mad vision of Solstice of the Sunflower, from 1945, the
year before his death.
Nash has more than one mood, of course. He can do pastoral
peace. Or in the cold views along Dymchurch shore there is an M R
James spookiness. Here, there are figures (rare in Nash) and they
might be drifting ghosts. But then you come up against The End of
the Steps, with its cuboid block of solid concrete. It's a blank
stop in the picture. It comes from somewhere else. It's
inexplicable, immemorial, perhaps extraterrestrial. That is the
essential Nash effect.
When Surrealism arrived, Nash consciously engaged with it. It's
not surprising that he felt affinities. For a time, he was
considered "English Surrealist-in-Chief". But his most orthodoxly
surreal pictures are his weakest. Pictures like Northern Adventure
and Landscape from a Dream are deliberate mix-ups. He is trying
hard to be irrational.
It's a question of what value you put on strangeness. Party-line
Surrealism played in negatively, a dissonance to stir up the mind,
break down categories. But for Nash, when he's on form, the
incongruous is only a step towards a mysterious synthesis, a way of
conjuring other dimensions of experience.
Out of Surrealism, Nash created his few actual visions of the
beyond. They're believable because you can't get your head round
them. The extraordinary Mansions of the Dead shows giant shelving
units and frameworks set in the clouds with flying discs gliding
around them. What kind of space is this? Is its genre paradise, or
sci-fi?
But his strongest scenes are set on Planet Earth. His trick is
the confrontation with the incomprehensible. In Pillar and Moon,
you notice the alignment between the stone ball finial on the top
of the pillar, and the full moon in the sky: two globes, the same
size, set almost at the same level in the picture. You can't say
whether this echo is meaningful or meaningless.
Circle of the Monoliths has a field of Avebury stones, but each
one apparently has its own patterned chair cover. This is bonkers
beyond Surrealism, so much so that it seems to know something. But
what? Or there's Event on the Downs, probably his finest work, all
the more strange for being (so to speak) entirely in prose. Front
of stage: a clump of tree-trunk and a tennis ball appear before us,
side by side. Behind them the downs roll away. The "Event" is
presumably their being together. What possible link between them?
What brought them here?
Nash paints the presence that doesn't make sense. That why,
rather than talking about animism or pantheism, which always have a
humanising touch, it may be better to think of UFOs, just so long
as it's understood that aliens really are alien. A good comparison
is cinematic. Think of the moment early on in 2001: a Space Odyssey
when the monkeys are startled by the arrival of the monolith,
standing there, out of nowhere.
His Second World War masterpiece, Totes Meer, has the same
effect. The graveyard of downed German aircraft, a vast sea of
broken wings and fusillages is one of those sights that make you
suddenly feel you have no idea where you are. The land been taken
over, changed beyond recognition. Wartime landscapes must have
offered such experiences quite often.
Even Landscape of the Vernal Equinox, wartime too but very
different in content, a view of Wittenham Clumps, one of Nash's
home subjects, has an unhomely feeling. With both a moon and a sun
in the sky, it is a "kaleidoscopic" scene, which holds several
spaces and lights, which the viewer can't resolve. You can only
chop and change between them. It's a landscape with no certain
ground.
People think Nash is a rather cuddly painter. He's a bit modern,
yes, but safely English romantic visionary, who loves the land and
fills it with character. Actually, most of his work goes the other
way. As his photographs of lone stones, abandoned structures and
smashed trees show - there's a good selection here - his
inclination isn't to animate the inanimate. It's to make it even
more inanimate, and resistant to our natural impulse to invest it
with our life. Nature becomes as if landed from Saturn.
So what would you believe, if you believed what these pictures
are saying? Something like: that the world around us is not ours.
It belongs to realms that are beyond us. Nash gives us the kind of
feeling that crop circles gave us, when they first appeared and
their status was still obscure and unaccountable. It's the kind of
feeling you still can get, momentarily, when you take a corner and
the landscape lies ahead transfigured by miles of wind farm. We
live in a changeling world.