Exhibition of the week Paul Nash
Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk). Until 5 March
Paul Nash is “one of the best-loved British artists of the 20th century”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Yet though he was undoubtedly one of the “pioneers” of modern art in this country, his paintings can today come across as rather conservative; indeed, it takes a “leap of the imagination” to believe that they once seemed radical, or even “dangerous”. Now, a new exhibition at Tate Britain – the largest devoted to Nash in a generation – seeks to reassess his reputation and position him squarely in the European avant-garde of his era. The show brings together paintings, drawings and even rarely seen sculptures, covering every phase of Nash’s 40-year artistic career. Though strangely scant on biographical information, it contains “more than enough superb works to make this one of the year’s essential exhibitions”.
Nash, who was born in 1889, “tapped into a peculiarly English poetic and visionary tradition while embracing the upheavals in European art”, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. His talent for capturing the strangeness of the English landscape was evident from an early age, evidenced here by a set of “inky” drawings he made as a young man that are “pregnant with spectral power”. But the idyllic nature of his early work was interrupted by the onset of the First World War, when he volunteered to serve in the Artists’ Rifles, an infantry brigade made up of painters, musicians, actors and architects. Nash was thrown into combat on the Western Front, an experience that led to “shattered and shattering” images, such as the famous We are Making a New World (1918), and The Menin Road (1919), which graphically distil the “horror of the killing fields”.
Nash could be “distinctly hit-and-miss” as a painter, and was “hopeless” at drawing people, said Martin Gayford in The Spectator. He was “emotionally drained” by the Great War, suffering a severe breakdown, and did not hit “top form” again until the Battle of Britain, when he was appointed as an official war artist. Totes Meer (1940-1), a painting of wrecked German planes in a dump outside Oxford, is “eerily magnificent”; the semi-abstract Battle of Germany (1944) is “almost visionary”. In the last few years before he died – from heart failure as a result of his chronic asthma – in 1946, he produced a “superb” series of landscapes that returned to his pastoral beginnings and straddled the divide between “old-fashioned” and “modern”. Paintings such as November Moon (1942) and Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (1943) are “wonderfully mellow, rich and strange”. They make a fitting climax to this “fine”, if uneven, show.