Early Life
Paul Nash was born in London on 11 May, 1889. He was educated at St Paul's Independent School for Boys and wanted to join the Navy, like his father. When he failed the entrance exam, Nash decided to take up art instead. He studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic, then London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography. On advise from friends, Nash enrolled into the Slade School of Art in 1910 but he never settled there and only stayed for a year. He studied under Henry Tonks, as did Stanley Spencer. Unlike Laura Knight, Nash had a privileged upbringing. His brother, John Nash, also became an official war artist and a successful painter. Paul Nash was more than just a painter. He illustrated books, designed textiles, theatre sets, posters and even turned his hand to interior design. Nash was an important figure in the English Surrealist movement, and a co-founder of Unit One, a group dedicated to advancing the cause of modernism in Britain.
Paul Nash was born in London on 11 May, 1889. He was educated at St Paul's Independent School for Boys and wanted to join the Navy, like his father. When he failed the entrance exam, Nash decided to take up art instead. He studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic, then London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography. On advise from friends, Nash enrolled into the Slade School of Art in 1910 but he never settled there and only stayed for a year. He studied under Henry Tonks, as did Stanley Spencer. Unlike Laura Knight, Nash had a privileged upbringing. His brother, John Nash, also became an official war artist and a successful painter. Paul Nash was more than just a painter. He illustrated books, designed textiles, theatre sets, posters and even turned his hand to interior design. Nash was an important figure in the English Surrealist movement, and a co-founder of Unit One, a group dedicated to advancing the cause of modernism in Britain.
World War 1
Nash won distinction as a fighting soldier during World War 1. He reluctantly enlisted into the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917. He was evacuated back home after breaking a rib. It was during this time of recovery that he produced a series of sketches and drawings of the front line that were exhibited at Goupil Gallery. These drawings brought him to the attention of the “War Propaganda Bureau” and he was recruited as an official war artist, expected to produce patriotic, propaganda (McCloskey, 2005). Once recovered from his injury, Nash returned to the front line where he was deeply moved by the changes he saw in the landscape and was disturbed by its devastation and destruction. Nash produced a number of oil landscape paintings depicting the devastation of war on the landscape. He was a fierce critic of the way that fighting on the Western Front of the First World War had been conducted, but was also immediate and steadfast in his revulsion towards Nazi Germany and its culture.
He wrote: "The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave, and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn in lousy souls." (McCloskey, 2005)
Nash won distinction as a fighting soldier during World War 1. He reluctantly enlisted into the Artists' Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917. He was evacuated back home after breaking a rib. It was during this time of recovery that he produced a series of sketches and drawings of the front line that were exhibited at Goupil Gallery. These drawings brought him to the attention of the “War Propaganda Bureau” and he was recruited as an official war artist, expected to produce patriotic, propaganda (McCloskey, 2005). Once recovered from his injury, Nash returned to the front line where he was deeply moved by the changes he saw in the landscape and was disturbed by its devastation and destruction. Nash produced a number of oil landscape paintings depicting the devastation of war on the landscape. He was a fierce critic of the way that fighting on the Western Front of the First World War had been conducted, but was also immediate and steadfast in his revulsion towards Nazi Germany and its culture.
He wrote: "The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave, and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn in lousy souls." (McCloskey, 2005)
We Are Making A New World (1918)
(Tap the painting for a closer look at the painting through an external link)
One of his most famous works shows a desolate landscape with shattered tress and the earth a mass of shell holes. High in the sky, the pale sun beams through thick, heavy clouds. The mounds of greenish earth are like graves and the ground is un-navigable and lifeless. It shows a scene that could not possibly regenerate even as the sun rises. It is a powerful image of death and desolation despite the lack of figures. Nash's interest in the human narratives shown in unpeopled views continued throughout his life.
“Nash was looking for a new kind of symbolism divorced from the more traditional Symbolist principles.” (IWM 2016) It is loosely that of modernist cubist-expressionism. Nash chose to work in this style not because of an abstract allegiance to its principles, but because the new kind of landscape produced by mechanised warfare looked expressionist-cubist (Lewis, 2010). The ironic title, We are Making a New World bitterly mocks the war's intention. Nash seems to understand and undermine the promise of technology in modernism.
This painting was based on a sketch Nash made in Inverness Copse, near Ypres in Belgium.
(Tap the painting for a closer look at the painting through an external link)
One of his most famous works shows a desolate landscape with shattered tress and the earth a mass of shell holes. High in the sky, the pale sun beams through thick, heavy clouds. The mounds of greenish earth are like graves and the ground is un-navigable and lifeless. It shows a scene that could not possibly regenerate even as the sun rises. It is a powerful image of death and desolation despite the lack of figures. Nash's interest in the human narratives shown in unpeopled views continued throughout his life.
“Nash was looking for a new kind of symbolism divorced from the more traditional Symbolist principles.” (IWM 2016) It is loosely that of modernist cubist-expressionism. Nash chose to work in this style not because of an abstract allegiance to its principles, but because the new kind of landscape produced by mechanised warfare looked expressionist-cubist (Lewis, 2010). The ironic title, We are Making a New World bitterly mocks the war's intention. Nash seems to understand and undermine the promise of technology in modernism.
This painting was based on a sketch Nash made in Inverness Copse, near Ypres in Belgium.
Between the Wars
Although Nash experimented further with Abstraction between 1929-1931, it never quite suited his needs. He remained a landscape artist but he remoulded nature to his needs. Nash was concerned that the meaning of his pictures "should be in the forms as forms." (Scalding, 1986)
World War 11
At the time of the Second World War, Nash was one of the best known British artists. Fearing what was to come, he moved with his wife out of London and went to live in Oxford. As a patriot, who believed in utilising fine art for propaganda, he was a natural choice to be an official war artist again. “I want to use what art I have and what I can make as directly as possible into the character of a weapon,” he said. (BBC, 2016)
Despite increasingly bad health, Nash immediately became involved in the war effort and he set up an Arts Bureau for War Service. This group united artists, architects, musicians and writers, and was intended to promote artistic skills in the service of war. Since childhood Nash was fascinated with planes and flying and during the second world war this was reignited. Although his paintings of aeroplanes were not technically accurate, they often showed the powerful feeling of loneliness of the air. He favoured symbolism and allegory over factual accuracy. |
Nash realised that the propaganda needed a new form and he began to experiment with collage and montage to produce powerful pictures. Follow the Fuhrer Above the Clouds 1942 shows the surreal depiction of a huge shark with menacing teeth and a face like Hitler's in the sky along with German war planes. He turned the sky into a sea, the planes becoming like fish. Nash says the planes as the true protagonists of war.
The Air Ministry rejected this painting as they wanted a more conventional, easily understood documentary work whereas the Kenneth Clark of the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) desired to foster art and creative innovation. Nash's defended his work stating that he didn't want to glorify mechanism, but waken in viewers a feeling of "dreadful fantasy, something suave but alarming." (McCloskey, 2005) |
Totes Meer (Dead Sea) 1940
Nash took photographs and made sketches of wrecked German aircraft when he visited the Cowley aircraft dump outside Oxford. He saw distinct personalities in the aeroplanes, and called them ‘enchanting monsters’. (Tate, 2016) In this, his most celebrated painting on this subject, he transformed the heap of twisted metal into an animated sea of rising crests and breaking waves. He painted it soon after the battle of Britain and at the hight of the London Blitz. He wanted this painting to boost patriotic sentiment.
Nash said of the painting; "The thing looked at me suddenly like a great inundating sea, a vast tide moving across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain and then nothing moves, it is not water or even ice; it is something static and dead. By moonlight this waning moon one could swear they began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air." (Tate, 2016) Nash wrote that, under moonlight, the sea of wreckage could be perceived to move and twist, but in reality it was of course dead, and the only movement was the flight of a white owl, depicted to the upper right.
While his contemporaries were painting heroic dog fights, portraits of officers or life on the home front, Nash did something much more original. Dead Sea was seen as an icon of anti German-ness not least by Nash. In fact he wanted it to be made into a postcard and sent to Germany as propaganda (BBC, 2016). Nash saw that modern war was inherently surreal and painted it like the fulfilment of a prophecy, a bad dream come true. The Air Ministry did not appreciate Nash’s symbolistic interpretation of wrecked fuselage and his work for the Ministry ended before the end of the war.
The desolate landscape harkens back to the paintings that Nash made as a war artist in the First World War, such as We Are Making a New World and The Menin Road, which did not celebrate British military prowess but sought to expose the pointlessness of a murderous and cynically prolonged conflict. The mournful tone, captured in the use of muddy, earthy hues used in much of his work, may also have been influenced by his personal circumstances: an affair with painter Eileen Agar was coming to an end, and Nash was suffering from a respiratory illness which ultimately caused his death in 1946.