Paul Nash
By Ossian Ward,Time Out, 10.02.10
It's been a five-star February already, with shows by Van Gogh,
Van Doesburg and Chris Ofili scoring big, but this might be the one
you remember most - whether or not you're new to the work of Paul
Nash. An unassuming British surrealist, he was also one of our
greatest landscape painters and is up there with JMW Turner, John
Constable and Samuel Palmer in my humble estimation.
This exhibition pits Nash needlessly against the theme of 'The
Elements', whether of fire, water etc, or of pictorial elements,
either in harmony or else in conflict. Elemental though his work
surely is, trying to squeeze such open, intense and dreamlike
output into a narrow theoretical framework is overcooking of the
highest order. Besides, most of us just come to see the
pictures.
And what pictures they are. The first room is a knockout,
perhaps slightly taking the wind out of the remaining galleries.
There are strange interior/exterior views showing the ceiling as
sky, the walls as forest and the floor as sea - visions Nash based
on seeing disjointed landscapes reflected behind him in a mirror. A
glorious yellow field strewn with bits of fighter plane, 'Bomber in
the Corn' of 1940, is bathed in several ages of healing light,
while his famous depiction of the rutted battlefields and scorched
trees of Ypres, 'We Are Making a New World' of 1918, is as poetic
as TS Eliot's 'Wasteland' and yet also a statement of fact.
This grouping is meant to display the artist's use of 'Elements
in Conflict', but even his most bleak wartime work was unified by
an unfailing optimism. Nature will overcome, these pictures seems
to promise, no matter how man has treated his fellow man, or how
much soil has been turned. 'The sun is God', as Turner said in his
last weeks of life.
From solstice to equinox, night to day, Nash made his seas sing
and his trees whistle. Not everything is anthropomorphised,
although some hills are clearly lady lumps and standing stones
their male equivalents. Instead, he painted the landscape as a
visceral, tangible entity and gets as close as Van Gogh did to
actually committing earth to canvas. His sense of place is
extraordinary too, but his unique ability was in transforming local
Kent or Dorset landmarks - like his beloved wooded copses, the
Whittenham Clumps, or a derelict mineshaft - into totems with
supernatural, symbolic powers. He identified with his surroundings
in a way that few of us can today, but he left a path through his
mind's eye open for us to take.
