Paul Nash

Delightful exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the life and work of Paul Nash.

I was already a big Nash fan and this show confirmed this for me. It also became a fascinating study in the effect of war on a person and their recovery. It was so clever that there was one room of his early work, placing him as an Edwardian artist with Blake overtones. You then passed into the next room of his war art and your world, like his, explodes. I hadn’t realised that while he was convalescing from a wound at home a large number of his regiment were killed in action. In his war work we see horror and guilt.

As we progress to the post war work we see a mind trying to recover. He reverts to his older subject of landscape but he can’t help but see the war in these familiar worlds, gravitating to land which is like Flanders or scenes like the front at Dymchurch with great diagonals like trenches cutting across it. He also starts to abstract landscape as if having seen it damaged he can no longer view it in such a naturalistic way.

I love his gentle colour palate and the way some of the more strange abstract effects turn out to be something real. There are lots of pictures with strange angular lines cutting though them, particularly from the early 1930s. Then you realise he lived in a flat looking out at the back of an advertising hoarding. Once you see a photograph of it you understand the zig zags.

I was also fascinated by his work from the Second World War mainly of piles of wrecked planes seeing death as an air born force. I loved the watercolour studies of the real piles of planes which he then worked into the larger canvases.

I felt by the end of this life he had returned to the peaceful mystical Edwardian start.

Closes on 5 March 2017

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