The killing fields

Published 04 August 2003

Art - Richard Cork on a painter who used his love of English landscape to show the horror of war

When Paul Nash was a student at art school, nobody could have foreseen his later conversion to modernism. Part of a Slade generation galvanised by the pre-1914 avant-garde, he remained stubbornly wedded to William Blake and the Romantic landscape tradition. While fellow students as fiery as David Bomberg embraced the revolution in art, Nash even became enthralled by "my god Rossetti".

Fascinated by George Borrow's writings on the scholar-gypsy, Nash drew a shadowy, sunset image of Lavengro and Isopel in the Dingle. And when night finally descends in Nash's early pictures, pyramids surge from the sea, or falling stars emblazon the heavens with a brilliant tracery of whiteness. Once, in 1914, Nash drew a bleak orchard where the branches have been stripped of all their leaves. It looks like a prophecy of the grievously damaged landscapes that he would paint during the Great War. But most of his early pictures celebrate the luxuriance of the English countryside, above all in the dense foliage of trees crowning two conical hills called the Wittenham Clumps. Once Iron Age forts, they fascinated Nash as a child and he felt compelled to revisit them throughout his life.

As Tate Liverpool's dramatic survey reveals, the advent of war would transform Nash from a gentle, backward-looking visionary into a shocked and angry rebel. When he first arrived at the Ypres Salient, however, Nash felt "as excited as a schoolboy", and likened the embattled landscape to the placid fields of Sussex. It was spring 1917, and a lucky tumble into a trench soon had him invalided and sent back home. The escape seems miraculous: only a few days later, his division was virtually massacred in a disastrous advance. Back in England, the convalescent made some oddly lyrical drawings of the killing fields, with titles as ridiculous as Chaos Decoratif. But when he returned to France as an official war artist, his entire attitude changed.

The horrors of Passchendaele convinced him of the conflict's catastrophic nullity. Although Nash had never been adept at depicting figures, he knew how to invest his war landscapes with a sense of human loss. Using oil paint for the first time, he realised that the aggressive angularity of Christopher Nevinson and the vorticists would enable him to develop a protesting vision.

We Are Making a New World is the savagely ironic title of his 1918 masterpiece. Ragged stumps of scorched, blasted tree trunks emerge mournfully from the mud-choked terrain. Although a sun appears behind them, it is inexplicably bleached and surrounded by hills whose colours resemble clotted blood. No soldiers can be detected, and yet the battered trees seem as human as the members of a chorus in a relentless tragedy.

First-hand experience of the battlefields turned Nash into a major British painter, and even after suffering a breakdown in 1921, he maintained his momentum. Convalescing in a cottage at Dymchurch on the Kent coast, he became fascinated by the immense wall built to prevent the sea flooding the marsh beyond. With an imagination still scarred by the nightmare of war, Nash dramatised the essential strangeness of the Dymchurch shoreline. He painted the bunker-like structure looming beside a flight of damp, glistening steps. He turned the breakwaters on the pale, uninhabited beach into a sequence of quasi-military fortifications. Dymchurch becomes a bleak and brutalised place, the absolute antithesis of a cosy seaside resort. People are nowhere to be seen; in their place, Nash focused on the unapologetic functionalism of a drainage trough. The unremitting starkness of the Dymchurch period culminates in a drily handled painting called The Shore. It has an end-of-the-world feeling, and the lessons that he learnt here inform much of his finest later work.

Among the undated photographs that Nash took during the inter-war years, images of mudflats, felled trees and flints on a doormat stand out. His engagement with the crude strength of ordinary objects impelled him to point his camera at a simple block of three steps, abandoned in a field near Swanage. They have the unforced dignity of a minimalist sculpture by Carl Andre or Donald Judd. And in one painting made in 1935, Equivalents for the Megaliths, he placed a cluster of plain, geometric objects in the middle of a well-cultivated English landscape.

By the mid-1930s, Nash had become centrally involved with a new movement whose members included Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and his old friend from the Slade Ben Nicholson. Calling it Unit One, he announced in a letter to the Times that artists and architects alike shared the "adventure, the research, the pursuit in modern life". Nash had certainly come a long way since his traditionalist days at art school, now insisting that British art should energise itself by working in tandem with the Continental avant-garde. But he was still in love with his old feeling for "the spirit of a place" in the English landscape. Near the horizon of Equivalents for the Megaliths, a hill-fort or barrow is still visible. While he embraced modernism in general, and the strangeness of surrealism in particular, Nash's admiration for prehistoric monuments intensified. Infatuated with the great standing stones at Avebury, he showed a line of megaliths advancing like primordial pylons across the countryside.

During the 1930s, Nash never succeeded in reconciling the different sides of his complex, divided imagination. His out-put was uneven, and the forays into surrealist territory can look embarrassingly forced. But the advent of another world war worked once more to his advantage. Commissioned again as an official war artist, he sketched wrecked German aircraft heaped at Cowley Dump and turned them into a potent elegy called Totes Meer (Dead Sea). Just as Caspar David Friedrich had made frozen waves into a tour de force of icy German Romanticism, so Nash turned the mangled shards of Luftwaffe planes into a metallic ocean. Shattered wings, punctured wheels and sliced-off cockpits jut upwards, lit by a lamenting moon. It is as if the sea at Dymchurch had become clogged with shattered bombers. Nash's government patrons savoured the propagandist charge inherent in such an image, but he had no wish to celebrate the enemy's destruction. Suffused instead with a melancholy awareness of the inescapability of death, Totes Meer is the work of an artist who guessed that chronic asthma would terminate his own life within a few years.

So indeed it proved. As his determination grew, and he managed to paint cosmic visions of air battles in the British and German skies, Nash's health waned inexorably. He resisted illness for as long as he could, and took strength from producing a prolonged series of sunflower images. In one sense, they mark a return to his beginnings as an artist, when Blake had commanded his passionate loyalty. But the eloquence of these final paintings benefits enormously from the widening of his ambitions since that parochial early period. The sunflower pictures are handled with an infectious sense of freedom, verging at times on wildness. Preoccupied now with the summer solstice, the moon's last phase and the vernal equinox, Nash allowed the sunflower to take on an astonishing elemental force. In one painting that dates from 1945, it becomes a burning firewheel rolling crazily up and down bare English hills. In another, it suffers an eclipse, as an orb of black, thickly applied pigment extinguishes the once glowing disc in the sky. Nash died a year later, at the age of 57. But even in this funereal painting, the sunflower's petals manage to flare outwards with undiminished zest.

"Paul Nash: modern artist, ancient landscape" is at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3 (0151 702 7400) until 19 October

Post this article to