Paul Nash - Landscape of the Moon's First Quarter
Paul Nash belongs to a tradition in painting that has taken the English Landscape as its theme. Referring to a garden in Buckinghamshire wrote:
It was undoubtedly the first place which expressed for me something more than its natural features seemed to contain, something the ancients spoke of as genius loci - the spirit of place… The place took on a startling beauty, a beauty to my eyes wholly unreal. It was this unreality, or rather this reality of another aspect of the accepted world, this mystery of clarity which was at once so elusive and so positive, that I now began to pursue and which from that moment drew me into itself and absorbed my life.
It was this paradox of the elusive so positively disclosed that drew Nash to the nearby Wittenham Clumps. He wrote:
Ever since I remember them the Clumps had meant something to me. I felt their importance long before I knew their history. They eclipsed the impression of all the early landscapes I knew. This, I am certain, was due almost entirely to their formal features…
The Clumps were spectacles; events in which the genius loci was disclosed to Nash. The form of a spectacle is a partial unveiling of the past by a present resemblance. Nash found in the spectacle things the disclosure of a natural and unconscious circulation. The spectacle is not consciously designed; it emerges naturally from tradition rather than being determined by choice.
The First World War was not the disclosure of a natural circulation, but the violation of tradition by an immutable imperative. Nash’s war landscapes disclose the bleakness, and self-hatred, of this imperative.
In the Autumn of 1921 Nash suffered a breakdown. He convalesced at Dymchurch on the south coast of Kent. In paintings under the influence of Cezanne, such as The Shore, the work became less spectacular, Nash became more concerned with the apparent form of nature than with circulation and disclosure.
By 1931 Nash had become convinced of the need for a modern movement in English Art. He showed Kinetic Feature in an exhibition that also featured Armstrong, Burra, Aldridge, Moore, Nicholson and Wadsworth. In 1932 Nash declared ‘A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place.’ Nash was referring to Unit One. In 1933 he wrote an article in The Listener which was in effect a manifesto for Unit One. He wrote:
The pursuit of form; the expression of the structural purpose in search of beauty in formal interaction and relations apart from representation. This is typified by abstract art. Second the pursuit of the soul, the attempt to trace the psyche in its devious flight, a psychological research on the part of the artist parallel to the experiments of the great analysts. This is represented by the movement known as surrealism.
Paul Nash belongs to a tradition in painting that has taken the English Landscape as its theme. Referring to a garden in Buckinghamshire wrote:
It was undoubtedly the first place which expressed for me something more than its natural features seemed to contain, something the ancients spoke of as genius loci - the spirit of place… The place took on a startling beauty, a beauty to my eyes wholly unreal. It was this unreality, or rather this reality of another aspect of the accepted world, this mystery of clarity which was at once so elusive and so positive, that I now began to pursue and which from that moment drew me into itself and absorbed my life.
It was this paradox of the elusive so positively disclosed that drew Nash to the nearby Wittenham Clumps. He wrote:
Ever since I remember them the Clumps had meant something to me. I felt their importance long before I knew their history. They eclipsed the impression of all the early landscapes I knew. This, I am certain, was due almost entirely to their formal features…
The Clumps were spectacles; events in which the genius loci was disclosed to Nash. The form of a spectacle is a partial unveiling of the past by a present resemblance. Nash found in the spectacle things the disclosure of a natural and unconscious circulation. The spectacle is not consciously designed; it emerges naturally from tradition rather than being determined by choice.
The First World War was not the disclosure of a natural circulation, but the violation of tradition by an immutable imperative. Nash’s war landscapes disclose the bleakness, and self-hatred, of this imperative.
In the Autumn of 1921 Nash suffered a breakdown. He convalesced at Dymchurch on the south coast of Kent. In paintings under the influence of Cezanne, such as The Shore, the work became less spectacular, Nash became more concerned with the apparent form of nature than with circulation and disclosure.
By 1931 Nash had become convinced of the need for a modern movement in English Art. He showed Kinetic Feature in an exhibition that also featured Armstrong, Burra, Aldridge, Moore, Nicholson and Wadsworth. In 1932 Nash declared ‘A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place.’ Nash was referring to Unit One. In 1933 he wrote an article in The Listener which was in effect a manifesto for Unit One. He wrote:
The pursuit of form; the expression of the structural purpose in search of beauty in formal interaction and relations apart from representation. This is typified by abstract art. Second the pursuit of the soul, the attempt to trace the psyche in its devious flight, a psychological research on the part of the artist parallel to the experiments of the great analysts. This is represented by the movement known as surrealism.
Given his reference to ‘the great analysts’ it seems probable that Nash identified art as a symbol of the artist’s unconscious. Nash’s work comes to resemble the metaphysical dream work of de Chirico whose work was exhibited for the first time in London in 1928.
In 1933 Nash discovered the standing stones at Avebury. The work that followed marked the return of the spectacle. He wrote:
The great stones were then in their wild state, so to speak. Some were half covered by the grass, others stood up in cornfields or were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under the turf. But they were wonderful and disquieting… The beauty and mystery of the Megaliths was something peculiar… in a mainly a formal sense, their colouring and pattern, Dream.
Here Nash remains concerned with abstract figures, but there is a return to the spectacular disclosure of the dream.
In ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’ Country Life 1937 Nash quotes Sykes Davies, who in an essay on Surrealism, wrote:
Wordsworth built up a mythology which has been of the very greatest importance in English culture. In its general outlines it conforms with the fundamental mythology of the human race; it is the systematic animation of the inanimate which attributes life and feeling to non-human nature.
The term ‘animate’ is ambiguous. It can be read as referring to the way a living thing expresses itself, or to the way in which a living thing is a spectacle. Nash wrote:
To attain personal distinction, an object must show in its lineaments a veritable personality of its own. It may be a stone which looks like a bloodhound, as the Avebury megalith here; but it must not have only and amusingly a canine look: it must be a thing which is an embodiment and most surely possesses power.
But the surrealist has a deeper thought about the found object: first, that by finding it you create it; second, that it has always been yours, living, as I understand, in the unconscious until the accident of your perception gives it birth.
There is a return to the tradition to which his earlier work belongs, but this coincides with the Second World War. Nash wrote:
I shared with Samuel Palmer an appetite for monstrous moons, exuberance of stars. … But my love of the monstrous and the magical led me beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds or states of the known world that were unknown. Here the night sky might be filled by immense figures … But when War came, suddenly the sky was upon us all like a huge hawk hovering, threatening. Everyone was searching the sky expecting some terror to fall; I among them scanned the low clouds or tried to penetrate the depth of the blue. I was hunting the sky for what I most dreaded in my own imagining. It was a white flower. Ever since the Spanish war the idea of the rose of death, the name the Spaniards gave to the parachute, had haunted my mind so that when war overtook us I strained my eyes always to see that dreadful miracle of the sky blooming with these floating flowers. (Counterpoint, 1945)
A spectacular painting is intended to function as a means of disclosing ‘states of the known world that were unknown’.
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