Paul Nash on my mind

Paul Nash, 'A Farm, Wytschaete' (1917), private collection

I am thinking a lot about Paul Nash at the moment. I first saw his iconic painting, 'We Are Making a New World' (1918), when I was about 16 or 17. That's what first got me interested in twentieth-century British art, and that's how I eventually came to write a short biography of Nash for Tate - and how I then got the idea for my 2009 book, A Crisis of Brilliance. Nash made this drawing, 'A Farm, Wytschaete', in the Ypres Salient, on the Western Front, in November or December 1917. It's going to be in an exhibition I am curating at the Piano Nobile Gallery in Holland Park, London, in October this year (2014).

On 16 November 1917, a day after he was ‘damn nearly killed’ by German shellfire, Nash wrote a now well-known letter to his wife, recording his impressions:

"I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings I have made I may give you some vague idea of the horror, but only being in it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature and of what our men in France have to face. We all have a vague notion of the terrors of a battle ... but no pen or drawing can convey this country — the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month. Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war, and no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave which is this land; one huge grave and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls."

This and other works like it (including 'New World') were exhibited in London in May 1918. The novelist Arnold Bennett wrote an ‘Introductory Note’ to the brief catalogue. He set out clearly what made them so successful, so powerful: ‘Lieutenant Nash has seen the Front simply and largely. He has found the essentials of it – that is to say, disfigurement, danger, desolation, ruin, chaos – and little figures of men creeping devotedly and tragically over the waste. The convention he uses is ruthlessly selective. The wave-like formation of shell-holes, the curves of shell-bursts, the straight lines and sharply-defined angles of wooden causeways, decapitated trees, the fangs of obdurate masonry, the weight of heavy skies, the human pawns of battle, - these things are repeated again and again, monotonously, endlessly. The artist cannot get away from them. They obsess him, and they obsess him because they are the obsession of trench-life. … They seem to me to have been done in a kind of rational and dignified rage, in a restrained passion of resentment at the spectacle of what men suffer, in a fierce determination to transmit to the beholder the full true horror of war. They are in an extreme degree educational; they are bound to educate everybody who sees them – statesmen, diplomatists, newspaper-readers, parents at home who can make nothing out of their sons’ hasty scrawls from the Front. But they are more than educational. Their supreme achievement is that in their somber and dreadful savagery they are beautiful. They give pleasure. We want to carry them away and possess them.’

Paul Nash, 29 April 1918, National Portrait Gallery

The exhibition was well received. ‘Mr Nash’s is an agonized vision’, wrote the anonymous reviewer for The New Statesman. ‘He seems to feel in himself the cruelties wreaked on the landscape, the wounds of the amputated trees … the torn wire entanglements writhe on their posts in the pitted ground like symbols of fantastic torment.’ John Rothenstein, the post World War Two Director of the Tate, would write in 1957, ‘I know of no works of art made by any artist working there who saw the splendours and miseries of the greatest of all theatres of war so grandly. Out of infinite horror he distilled a new poetry.’ The best of them, Rothenstein predicted, ‘will take their place among the finest imaginative works of our time’.