Paul Nash: The Elements
10 February - 9 May, 2010
Supported by
Delancey
Air Canada
Dulwich Picture Gallery - Admission Charge
Paul Nash (1889-1946) was that rare thing, an English surrealist. He attended the Slade School of Art in London and held his first exhibition in 1912. From the beginning of his career, his landscape paintings were intensely symbolist in nature. Symbolism was a movement that began in the 1880s, which placed the reality of fantasy and dream in place of the naturalism of the material world. In 1917 he served at the front with the British army as a war artist. By the late 1920s, his work was showing the influence of cubism.
In Kinetic Feature (1931) we see a form reminiscent of a broken column, encircled by other, abstract forms. Their position about the column, together with the title of the painting, suggest movement. This links the painting to another strand of English art, vorticism. But his cubist/vorticist phase passed and Nash continued to be an essentially a landscape painter, or rather, a painter of dreamscapes.
| ||
| Paul Nash Design for Urne Buriall - Ghosts, 1931-32 Hand-coloured collotype on paper 28.7 x 21.1 cm Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery...JPG |
Consider Design for Urne Burial – Ghosts, painted by the same year as Kinetic Feature. A female figure walks down a staircase into a hideous underworld of harpies and gorgons, Nash’s vision of the Greek legend of Persephone and her descent into Hades. Despite the nightmarish subject matter it is a very beautiful image, the elements of which float about in a dreamlike fashion. Nash’s dalliance with the materiality of cubism was over and he had returned to his ‘real’ world of vision. However, Nash could not entirely escape the material world.
His experience as a WW1 soldier had left him scarred and many of his images betray his bleak outlook on humanity. In Totes Meer (1940 –1) we see a half-moon hanging over a sea of wreckage; biplane wings, plane castors and stripped bodywork. The insignia of the Luftwaffe is visible on two pieces. The painting can be read in two ways. The Great War was long over and the only wreckage we see is that of machinery, with the gibbous moon symbolising the triumph of nature over technology.
| ||
| Paul Nash Totes Meer, 1940-1 Oil on Canvas 101.6 x 152.4 cm Tate, London.jp |
Sadly, the Second World War was in full swing when Nash painted Totes Meer and the painting could be read as his longing for it to be over. Even more tragically, Nash died just one year after the war did finish. Paul Nash: The Elements is a fitting evocation of this poet, painter and battle-scarred soldier who was able to turn elements of this imperfect world into the haunting dreamscapes that are his paintings. It is open at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 9 May.
Mary Phelan © Artyfacts 2010