Paul Nash, by Andrew Causey – review

Andrew Causey opens his book on a slightly defensive note: Paul Nash, he says

is often identified as Britain’s outstanding 20th-century landscape painter, as if painting the natural scene was the only thing he did, or landscape art as a genre is entirely separable from others, such as portraiture or history painting.

It is unexpected to find that at least among art historians the idea of landscape painting as a lesser genre still lingers. To the general public Paul Nash is as likely to be familiar as an official war artist of both world wars, author of one of the most indelible images of the Great War, ‘We are Making a New World’ (1918), with its splintered trees, cratered earth and blood-red clouds, and of the sea of wrecked German aircraft of ‘Totes Meer’ of 1946.

But of course it is true that unlike his brother John, Paul Nash used landscape as a vehicle for metaphysical matters beyond the recording of its beauty or of the personal emotions it aroused. He was after the great dramas and mysteries of existence and the perennially absorbing question of what happens to us when we die. He saw the cycle of birth, growth, death and renewal, the dramas of decay and survival, paralleled in landscape, in the cycle of the seasons, the travels of ‘the great luminaries’, the sun and moon, the battle between sea and land. And not being able to create human figures of a grandeur to sustain such subjects, he substituted objects, both natural and man-made, to play their parts. They became what Nash, in his 1937 essay ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’, called ‘personages’.

Nash was a slow starter (amazingly only teaching himself oil-painting in 1918 in order to undertake large-scale commissions for the Imperial War Museum).