(Above) Paul Nash, Totes Meer (1940-1941). © Tate London
Exhibition: Paul Nash: The Elements, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until May 9 2010
Paul Nash is simultaneously hailed as both an English Romantic with "Wordsworthian intuition" and a visionary surrealist ahead of his time. He is perhaps best known for the landscape images of both World Wars he produced as an Official War Artist.
The Great War transformed Nash from a youthful painter into a messenger charged with bringing home the horrors of the conflict. The two World Wars gave him a mental backdrop to explore a new Surrealist style of painting.
Most iconic of these is the oil painting Totes Meer or "dead sea", in which an undulating sea of German aircraft wreckage dramatically covers the English landscape.
The eclectic body of work on show at Dulwich Picture Gallery captures the artist’s peculiar positioning within British art and traces the development of Nash’s ideas and evolving style. It explores his love for landscape and his unique fusion of traditional and modern.
His famous depictions of war are interspersed with idyllic scenes of the English countryside and imagined landscapes. Because the work is hung thematically rather than chronologically it also demonstrates the way in which Nash revisited and reworked the same fixations.
Paul Nash, Event on the Downs (1934). The Government Art Collection (UK). © Tate, London
This is emphasised in the latter part of the exhibition with the painting Nostalgic Landscape – a view of one of the defensive towers on the sea wall near his home in Dymchurch.
The painting was revised after several years to include an imaginary entrance through the tower, leading to a dark space with its own discontinuous perspective. After the loss of his father, windows, doors, empty rooms and dark portals to another world featured strongly in the artist's work.
Most striking of all is the uncanny sense of the work being haunted by the aftermath of war. It manifests itself in blood red skies, splintered stumps of trees, eerie shadows and ghostly moons.
The theme of elements in conflict features strongly in the first part of the exhibition. A painting called Bomber in the Corn juxtaposes the idyllic calm of the countryside with the wreckage of a German bomber plane.
The death of nature is used time and again to lament the death of men. Devastated landscapes are emotively painted, drawn and photographed with astoundingly poignant effect.
And in the years after the Great War, when Nash suffered a nervous breakdown, there is a prevalence of bleached and muted seascapes with featureless, flat skies. These paintings include solitary figures - possibly Nash himself or ghostly apparitions.
Paul Nash, Landscape from a Dream (1936-1938). © Tate London
Visitors may also notice the prominence of trees that take on an almost human form. In an uneasy period after the Great War, Nash would paint trees as natural refuges. He delicately painted birds nesting in them like human souls retreating to the clouds.
In Pillar and Moon, trees are pictured together in freakishly regimented rows like giant soldiers. An earlier lithograph, Marching at Night, sees Nash using trees to mark a change in optimism. They are aggressively scratched in, and tower forebodingly over a regiment of soldiers marching in the rain.
Nash would instinctively look out for real objects and scenes to use in his visual dramas. He characteristically displaced familiar objects in scenes painted from his imagination and from his photographs – some of which, including collages, are on display
The show is a welcome retrospective of a great English artist that offers an insight into the thinking behind his most harmonious compositions.
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