![]() ![]() We Are Making a New World (also from 1918) shows tree stumps, like a group of eerie sentinels, featured against a high horizon, over which a cold, chalk-white sun spreads its watery rays like thin search beams. ![]() We see how, in an almost monochrome painting, the corner of a sky appears like an ominously spreading bruise in red and mauve.Īnger comes through in the mocking title of one painting. ![]() The sheet of barbed wire encases the lone tree stump whose erupted form suggests a crown of thorns, while the other distant tree stumps resemble stakes ploughed into the barren ground. We see how the depiction of the suffering of the Earth takes on an almost religious quality in Wire, a watercolour from 1918. It is always the aftermath of battle he depicts, not the tense moment just before an attack, nor the dramatic moment during it. Instead it’s nature that is disturbingly violated by the deadly weapons of war. The survey features not only his most powerful war paintings, but devotes considerable space to the influence of the European avant-garde, particularly Surrealism, on his later output, in which that mood of disquiet becomes even more pronounced. They provide an insight into the strange and haunted mood of his paintings, though they are somewhat hastily glossed over or left unmentioned in the otherwise superb Paul Nash retrospective currently at London’s Tate Modern. These biographical details are not incidental to Nash’s creative development. He suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout his life, and his wartime experience would leave him, though no less productive, mentally and emotionally debilitated for years. He may even have feared such a fate himself (just as, incidentally, that other great British landscape painter, JMW Turner had like Nash, Turner’s mother had died in an asylum). In some ways, the profound shock of it must have echoed the loss of his mother, who had died in a mental institution when Nash was 20. Despite his fluency and eloquence as a writer – his wartime letters to Margaret brilliantly express his despair and bitter anger at the destruction that surrounded him – it was a loss that he was never able to speak of directly. ![]()
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