The London Magazine, 15 Nov 2019
Review by Simon Tait: Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley didn’t invent Op Art. The phrase first appeared in Time Magazine in 1964 in response to Julian Stanczak’s exhibition Optical Paintings. Defined as a form that uses visual trickery to challenge perception, it was a natural successor to Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism and even Dadaism, liberated by Impressionism. But Riley made it what it is now.
She’s been doing it over almost 70 years, and the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, in her 89th year, is the definitive retrospective, her exhibition – ‘One of the great artists this country has produced’, Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward’s director says of her, precisely. ‘Her work is a perpetual process of discovery’. She worked closely on the show with designer Paul Williams (half of the Stanton Williams architecture/design partnership), a collaborator for 25 years, and she vetoed two previous plans before sanctioning this hang.
In contrast to its previous presentation in Edinburgh last summer, this exhibition is not chronological but thematic, and though the pictures are the same – apart from four wall paintings that have been added to profound effect – the difference is between the history of Bridget Riley and the story of her work, the narrative she wants to portray.
The show effectively starts with her one conspicuous failure, Continuum (1963, revisited in 2005), the only three-dimensional piece she undertook which is a walk-in cylinder of a spiralling continuous surface, and it was too physical. ‘The viewer found himself actually “in” the work,’ she says, ‘where all I wanted was visual absorption’. She abandoned the idea, and later explored flat enveloping images that propose infinity with vast murals such as the one next to Continuum, Circles 4 of 2004.
This reflects the purpose of Riley’s work, as well as her progression: the visual, and how manipulations at different times of line, form and colour change perceptions to the extent that a flat canvas itself can become three-dimensional and colours appear where there are none. And the thing about Op Art is that it isn’t just illusion: on the top floor of the gallery are her sketches, the painstaking handwritten notes, the plans confined by graph paper squares, the tissue paper cut into spirals, as well as her competent art school life drawings; and somewhere in all this is the ingredient that turns the calculated illusion to beauty, to art.
The paintings and designs may seem essentially mathematical, but the first expression is always on to paper. ‘For me’, she wrote in the catalogue of a 2009 Arts Council touring exhibition, ‘drawing is an enquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided that I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do’.
Riley tells a story about Blaze I, the black and white spiral of chevrons that first made her name. She was twenty-eight on her first visit to the south of France, and had no more than an inkling of what she wanted to do. She brought the unformed inkling back to London where she developed a geometric shape in her mind, looking at it from different angles and positions, and then from above… suddenly she had it, she could commit something to paper: ‘And I realised it was about the light from the Mediterranean I was seeing, the light you never get in London’.
She had her first solo show a couple of years later at the One Gallery in 1962, seen by the critic David Sylvester, who ‘got it’ immediately: ‘This proposing and disposing of order seems no mere game with optical effects, seems to symbolise, dramatically, an interplay between feelings of composure and anxiety’, he wrote in a review.
Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art made her a painter, but it was while she was working in advertising that she fell under the influence of the Impressionists, the Post Impressionists and Seurat in particular, revealed so thoroughly in the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition four years ago, Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat. It was at the Courtauld in the late 50s that she saw Seurat’s Le Pont de Courbevoie and made her copy of it, a larger version than the original, that still hangs in her studio as a perpetual reminder today.
What she discovered in Seurat was the use of colour to create light, and through it movement, and how the painting was designed to inspire the act of looking. ‘His work gave me a sense of the viewer’s importance as an active participant’, she wrote later. ‘Perception became the medium’.
This has been her guiding principle, and the reason that her copy of The Bridge is still important. Cezanne, Monet, Matisse, Pollock have all been inspirations. ‘Impression was a way of looking’, she says, ‘which established what I aspired to. Abstractism is finding out what a particular form can do’.
But the difference between this Hayward account of the Riley achievement – using 200 works, and 50 key paintings – and the Edinburgh exhibition is that the chronological account is not the point. The phases and chapters stand by themselves without necessarily having to be in any order. She has all her black-and-whites in one large section, showing how she began, but also how she returns to earlier thoughts with new interpretations and fresh ideas. The confident, jangling triangles of Quiver of 2014, for instance, near the more orderly, tentative pieces making up Tremor of 1962. In recent years she has become interested again in the monochrome interaction of forms, lately returning to circles.
The way shapes respond to each other, almost introducing their colours as they interlace, led her later colour pieces (four of them shown together) from Justinian of 1988 to From Here of 1994. ‘I have to find out what a particular form can do without breaking its character’, she says. ‘Something has to serve a purpose – it doesn’t have to represent anything’. Knowing what will work is almost like déjà vu, she says, as if you’re not inventing something but remembering it. It’s already familiar: Cézanne’s word for it was “sensation”’.
When the colours are twisted along a curve, their relationship is different again, something that has been revisited though Riley’s career, with shapes cut from coloured paper, à la Matisse, and moved around like jigsaw puzzle pieces until the fit was right. ‘A rhythmic vehicle for colour’, she calls it. And the collection of her writing, edited by Robert Kudielska and recently republished by Thames & Hudson, bears the title she chose for it: The Eye’s Mind.
The dynamic varies but never seems to lessen, and today she is as enthusiastic as ever. ‘Energy, I hope and pray, is what I can still invest in it’, she says. ‘It’s a very active thing, the work, and it’s also something I love doing. And maybe that’s the secret.’
Bridget Riley (solo show) is on view from October 23, 2019 – January 26, 2020, at the Hayward Gallery. For more information, read here.
ARTLYST 28 June 2019
FairforSaatchi, Saatchi Gallery, 26-30 June by Simon Tait
The reason why this new contemporary and modern art fair is at the Saatchi Gallery as a “pop-up” lies in it being organised in a frantic six weeks, but its creator is certain it will be an annual fixture.
The London art calendar is a chess board, with events shifting about to match moves and counter moves. Masterpiece in Chelsea has become the early summer yardstick, having gone to late June to dodge the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair earlier in the month, then to coincide with the Olympia Art and Antiques Fair which seems to be on the wane. Contemporary and modern art was served by the Art London Fair and the 20/21 International Art Fair, only partly replaced by the Mayfair Art Weekend.
“Art London and 20/21 don’t exist anymore”, said FairforSaatchi’s founder Robert Sandelson, “so we’re filling the gap. There’s always a demand for fairs; dealers want a stand in a good fair in early summer, they’re not keen on Olympia any more, they want a more modern look. So I’m serving that need.”
For 30 years Sandelson was one of the most respected dealers in the West End, but his Cork Street gallery closed two years ago and he shifted to festival organising. Last year he and his brother, the property developer Johnny Sandelson, bought the British Art Fair and moved it to the Saatchi Gallery.
He sees the Saatchi as a natural fair venue; its rooms in the former barracks offer large spaces, brilliant prosaic white walls and high ceilings giving a sense of airy freedom. It was the success of the inaugural British Art Fair there in September that led him to devise FairforSaatchi, his good contacts in the art market making certain that the project was on, fitting into the newly vacant calendar slot. He filled the allotted space with 25 dealers, mostly from London but some from beyond and a couple from Europe.
The Mayor Gallery presented an effective history of Op Art, starting from Julian Stanczak, the Polish artist who lost his right arm in a Siberian gulag and whose work appearing in the 1965 MOMA show Responsive Eye gave the genre its name. There’s a new interest in Op Art in this technology-aware era, says Mayor’s Christine Hourdé, both among collectors and artists. There was a standing lamp by Vassilakis Takis, Signal, a taster for a Tate Modern retrospective opening on July 3.
Castlegate from Cockermouth in Cumbria, one of the out-of-town galleries, had a star-studded offering, including a Francis Bacon self-portrait triptych lithograph, a Hockney drawing and a stunning Auerbach charcoal self-portrait of 2017. Castlegate’s co-owner, Christine Swallow, said many of the works came straight from the walls of her home where they have been more companions than investments, including a Wilhelmina Barns Graham acrylic riot of colour, -Composition on Red, made three years before her death in 2004.
There was an intriguing reminder of a sadly forgotten talent from Sally Hunter Fine Art, a couple of exquisite art deco drawings from Nommie Durell who died in her 80s in 1989 and had been part of the 1930s Thames-side jeunesse d’oré, where close friends had included Victor Pasmore, AP Herbert and Robin Darwin; later Kwame Nkrumah, who was to become president of Ghana, sat for her.
Adrian Hill joined forces with the Five Seven Two Gallery to present an eclectic selection that included an intriguing LS Lowry drawing, Beachcombers, 2nd September 1956, 14ins by 10ins, of a bewildered looking young man in blazer and tie with trousers haphazardly rolled up, standing with bucket and spade while two small children gaze up at him expectantly. It came with a daunting price tag of £72,500. The stand also had a surprising Hockney lithograph and screenprint from 1979, a very Hokusai-influenced Snow without Colour, which looked like anything but a Hockney. There were also more recognisable David Shrigleys, prints of Be Nice and I’m Sorry for Being Awful.
Adding colour was the Freya Mitton Gallery, with more expectable British modern masters Sandra Blow, Alan Davie and Terry Frost.
From Brussels, Art Sablon brought the striking Martyrs by the Suffolk-based sculptor James B Webster, seven heads standing side by side on separate plinths, exquisitely carved in porcelain with finely defined expressions but each looking like the recently deceased; two even had porcelain hoods. But if there was melancholy there, White Room Art’s stand lifted the mood with the impertinent photomontages of Alison Jackson which had Trump breaking diplomatic barriers on a desktop with Miss Mexico, the Queen taking selfies of herself and couple of duchesses, and Boris Johnson, Trump and Nigel Farage sharing a sauna.
The most intriguing room was also the largest, devoted to a 96-year-old getting her first substantial exhibition, under the auspices of Venice’s Andrea Tardini Gallery. Suzanne Perlman was born in Budapest where she met and married her Dutch grain dealer husband Henri when she was 16. In 1940 she escaped the Nazis, first from Holland then from France, to settle in Dutch Curaçao where she began to paint, becoming a local celebrity with her sometimes chaotic, richly and often sombrely coloured canvasses of local scenes and dignified portraits of local people. She moved to New York to study at Columbia School of Ars and mix with the American Expressionists, being particularly influenced by de Kooning.
Perlman fell under the spell of Oscar Kokoschka, went to Salzburg to attend his classes becoming a studio assistant, and developing her own Expressionist style. She continued with it when she moved to London in 1990 after Henri’s death, where she still paints – her most recent picture on show was from 2018, a portrait of a young black man.
“I love it”, she said of the display of 22 canvases. “Each painting has its own space – paintings need space – and I can see my life here, remembering each picture intimately. Everywhere I go I find so interesting, and every person.”
The Art Newspaper, 24 April 2019
Research centre based on the library of German art historian Aby Warburg plans to open new public spaces in 2022
SIMON TAIT
The Warburg Institute in London is embarking on an ambitious £14.5m development to raise its profile and ward off the stark challenges posed by Brexit. “We have the opportunities—architectural, financial and intellectual—not just to preserve the Warburg as an international beacon for interdisciplinary scholarship but to give it a more public role for the future,” says its director Bill Sherman, the former head of research and collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A research institute with 45 master’s and doctoral students, and 3,000 reader’s ticket holders, the Warburg is devoted to the study of cultural memory through the interactions between images and society over time. Its collection of more than 450,000 images and at least 350,000 books is based on the unique library amassed by the German Jewish art historian and banking scion Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Established in his Hamburg home in 1909, it was smuggled out of Nazi Germany to London in 1933. The institute became part of the University of London in 1944, moving into its current building, designed by Charles Holden, in 1957.
The new development by Haworth Tompkins architects, dubbed the Warburg Renaissance, is due to be completed by September 2022. Aside from expanding the institute’s research and collection spaces, the project aims to revive the original spirit of discovery and debate of Aby Warburg’s “science of culture”. Among the new public facilities planned are an exhibition gallery, a digital laboratory and a bigger lecture hall in the central courtyard, offering talks with curators, artists and scholars. The University of London is providing core funding of £9.5m, leaving £4m still to be raised.
Sherman also has hopes for a Viennese-style café, like the Neue Galerie’s Café Sabarski in New York. “The Sabarski is as close to Vienna as you get outside of Vienna,” he says. “It would be good to invoke the cafe culture of Central Europe, and these were the kinds of places where some of the best conversations happened and that generated institutes like this”.
But the Warburg faces a significant threat from Brexit, Sherman believes. The institute risks losing vital research and student funding from the European Union (around €2m a year), from the German government, which last June pledged €6.3m over five years, and from individual donors across Europe. Sherman is also concerned that fees for European students, who currently pay the same as UK nationals, could rise by two or three times after Brexit. At present, half the student body and a third of staff come from overseas.
While Sherman pursues outreach in China, South America and the US to attract more international students beyond Europe, the institute is celebrating a major boost to the redevelopment campaign. Earlier this month, it announced a £1m lead gift from the Hamburg-based Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung and the launch of the Warburg Family Circle, attended by 26 family members from six countries. “Aby Warburg’s legacy is much more than memory,” says the foundation’s chairman, Bernhard Reemtsma. “It is vitally alive and we can still learn from his ideas. The Warburg Institute connects Warburg’s intuitive cognition to our present and future.”
The London Magazine, April/May 2019
Simon Tait
The Power of Seeing, 2 Temple Place, London WC2R 3BD, January 26 to April 22
John Ruskin: Art & Wonder, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, May 22 to September 15
There was an awkward moment at the V&A last September when Chris Smith, Lord Smith of Finsbury and the first Blair culture secretary, was delivering the Ruskin Foundation’s annual lecture. His grist was free admission for national museums and galleries which he had ushered in in 2001: “I’m afraid I find myself in opposition in one respect” he said. “Ruskin believed you should value art enough to be prepared to pay to see it”.
Well, yes. And emphatically no. And that is the problem with Ruskin. He won’t fit any convenient categories, and while he undoubtedly did think the well-off should pay to go into public galleries he also thought that not just the wealthy should have art in their lives.
So he made his own large collection of art and objects into a free museum for working people, an educational exhibition. And it was for the people of Sheffield that he gave it because he admired the devoted craftsmanship of steelworkers – craftsmanship was a sacred gift. It opened early and closed late, even on Sunday. “It was not meant for casual pottering on a nice day out, it was meant for workers to inspire creativity, but also just to make them happier”, said Louise Pullen, curator of the collection and of this exhibition.
Ruskin was a spectrum of contradictions: a high Tory who was a social reformer, a deeply devout man and powerful preacher who loathed the church, a lover of classical architecture who abhorred the neo-classical, a champion of great art, particularly of the Pre-Raphaelites and the inspiration for William Morris and the Art & Crafts movement, who despised academic painting, especially that in public galleries – “Walked down to Dulwich Gallery” he noted in his diary in 1844 “and thought the pictures worse than ever; came away encouragingly disgusted”.
He was probably the most famous man of his time, certainly the most famous intellectual, whose influence was profound and wide, who is barely known of now but whose time may have come again.
In Sheffield in the 1870s he set up the Guild of St George with its own – free – public museum. Its sole purpose was to make Britain a happier place to live in by challenging the zeitgeist for profit and mass-production with love of beauty. “I have listened to many ingenious persons” he wrote in one of his Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain “who say we are better off now than ever we were before” but (he went on) “we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of us are living… in… beggary”.
He consigned his collection of over 17,000 things to the Guild’s museum for the education, stimulation and inspiration of working men. He included copies of great paintings he’d had specially commissioned, architectural studies, Turner sketches, geological specimens, casts of sculpture, medieval manuscripts and rare books.
For the first time and to mark the centenary of Ruskin’s birth some of that collection is being seen outside Sheffield with the exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing at 2 Temple Place. The exhibition is not merely a transplanting of the Guild collection from Sheffield to London for a few months. Ms Pullen is using the collection to frame a biographical narrative, with augmentations of loans – the Turner Venetian Festival, for instance, is borrowed from Tate as a reference point; to Ruskin oil painting was for baronial halls, not for the horny-handed for whom he considered watercolour to be a more truthful medium. And rather than simply tell Ruskin’s story, the choice of objects helps set out what Ruskin wanted to say to his working class audience: that in Keatsian terms, truth is beauty, and beauty is nature.
John Ruskin was the only child of a wealthy wine merchant and Margaret, the daughter of the landlord of the Old King’s Head in Croydon, a prim and pious lady who had already changed her surname from Cock to Cox. He was a precocious infant, educated by tutors at home, and his father, John James, had a career path mapped out for his son at an early age: it would culminate in his being either Archbishop Canterbury or Poet Laureate.
But young Ruskin went his own way. When he was 13 and absorbed by the new science of geology, he was given a book-length poem illustrated by J M W Turner’s etchings, and his attention veered. Turner, born in 1775, was his mid-50s when Ruskin first came upon his work and famous, a full Royal Academician 17 years before Ruskin was born, but out of fashion.
He travelled through Europe, and his first published work was a poem, Skiddaw and Derwent Water, when he was ten. At 15 he had three articles on geology published in the Magazine of Natural History and in the year before he went up to Oxford, 1837, the Architectural Magazine began to serialise his The Poetry of Architecture.
Ruskin got a scholarship to Christ Church as a “gentleman commoner”. He won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry (when he met Wordsworth), but was ill for much of his time at Oxford with suspected consumption, despite the ministrations of his mother who took lodgings in the High Street so that she could have tea with him every day. He eventually graduated in 1842, aged 23, with a pass, elevated to a rare “honorary double fourth-class” to recognise his achievements.
A year later he began the work he is most famous for, Modern Painters, a brilliant defence of Turner which, when it was finally finished in 1860, was to run to more than 1,500 pages. The first volume was published in 1843 and he quickly became a doyen among art critics. It’s hard to believe now that in the mid 19th century Turner was unpopular, but Ruskin wrote in his Praeterita autobiography in the 1880s, “Nobody, in all England, at that time,—and Turner was already sixty,— cared, in the true sense of the word, for Turner, but the retired coachmaker of Tottenham (a reference to the wealthy collector Benjamin Windus), and I”.
In 1848 he married the 20-year-old daughter of family friends, Effie Gray, and whether or not he was disgusted by the sight of wife’s naked form as was later claimed, the marriage was never consummated and was anulled in 1854. A year later Effie married Ruskin’s protégé, John Everett Millais, and had eight children.
But Ruskin’s enthusiasms expanded to conserving architecture, and to Venice in particular, so his next books were The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1848 and The Stones of Venice in 1851, and to science. In the mid-1850s he began teaching at the Working Men’s College in London, attracting audiences fascinated by his stentorian style of speaking and florid language, as they did when he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869.
Ruskin had no particular affinity with Sheffield, and probably only went there half a dozen times, but he considered its steelworkers the most skilled craftsmen in the world, so aimed his philanthropy at them. The collection surivives in the city’s Millennium Gallery.
The surprising thing about this survey is the quality of Ruskin’s own work. He was an accomplished draughtsman and there is drama and infinite accuracy in, for instance, his pen and ink drawing of Ancienne Maison, Lucerne, Switzerland, done when he was 16, or his watercolour study of a peacock;s feather. A page of sketches for his The Stones of Venice of about 1849 shows an architect’s obsession with detail. And there is a moving passion in his watercolour of the porch and buttress of the 15th century St Wulfram’s church in Abbeville, done in 1868, which he was worried about – “It is the last [late Gothic building] I know left untouched, and it is to be ‘restored’ in the spring”, he wrote. The watercolour and gouache portrait, probably a self-portrait, of 1875 when he opened the museum is gently painted, but the intense gaze of the pale blue eyes demands respectful attention.
The other artists he chooses are not well known now but give honest, simple accounts: Samuel Prout’s The Piazzetta, Venice of the 1830s; William Hunt’s Grapes and Pineapple of about 1850; George Allen’s Study of Thorns done in 1859 for the last volume of Modern Painters, an example of the “minutest extremities” of a tree that have to be studied to understand the tree’s “character”.
Ruskin’s influence was immense during his lifetime and into the 20th century – he died in 1900 – and today his teaching has a new relevance. His attitude was that monetary wealth was meaningless without happiness, and happiness lay in slowing down and enjoying beauty, which fits with the modern appreciation of mindfuness and well-being.
“I think he is the finest writer living”, George Eliot wrote to Barbara Leigh Hunt in 1856 after reading volume 4 of Modern Painters. “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, has always the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”
The London Magazine, February/March, 2017
Simon Tait
Paul Nash, Tate Britain, London, until 5 March
When, in his 1943 book British Romantic Artists, John Piper included a painting by Paul Nash, Nash objected. “Romantic art, what is that?” he responded. “Constable, Steer, Sickert Romantic painters?… when all is said I do not like the word Romantic applied to that which in its best and truest expression in England should be called Poetic”.
Nash was certainly influenced formatively by artists generally regarded as Romantic – Blake, Rossetti, Palmer and even Edward Lear – and there is naturally a strong literary association with them. This exhibition, the largest in a generation, has the advantage of being based on the Tate’s Nash archive which has a great deal of his writing of which the in-house curators have made good use.
If there is a poet whose work Nash’s pictures embody it is Gerard Manley Hopkins whose concept of “inscape” to describe the character of a natural scene matches Nash’s of “genius loci” in which he perceived an “imprisoned spirit” and “the source, the motive power” of a place. It is that spirit that, arguably, all of Nash’s work seeks. It has been too easy to summarise Nash’s career as two world wars and some landscapes in between, but that ignores the many excursions that made him a truly important painter.
There was something mystical about the arrangement first of nature and then of objects and objects’ construction that fascinated Nash all his life, along with an abiding yearning to virtually fly. At the start of the exhibition is Nash’s Blake-like Vision at Evening, a watercolour of 1911 which has a female face as the moon hovering over the Buckinghamshire countryside; at the end of it, before his death in 1946 at only 57, are the moons, suns and cosmic orbs still casting their spells over English nature.
There was no thought of becoming an artist in Nash’s childhood. His parents wanted him to join the navy but he failed the entrance exams, and training to be “an illustrator of some kind” was a fall-back. He studied lithography, but was soon disillusioned with the world of posters and show-cards and more interested in writing poetry. He dropped out of the Slade because he couldn’t draw figures well.
He painted the trees that surrounded his family home at Iver Heath, especially at night when they took on beguiling new personalities under the ubiquitous moon. “O dreaming trees, sunk in a swoon of sleep,” he wrote in a poem of 1909, “What have ye seen in these mysterious places?” His paintings were being noticed and after a successful exhibition with his younger brother John in 1913 he was accepted into the pre-war artists’ coterie of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.
But Nash had been woken from his spectral watercolour world first by falling in love and then by the First World War. A few months after marrying the suffragist Margaret Odeh in 1914 he joined the Artists’ Rifles, but even in the devastation of the Ypres Salient through which he marched, he wrote to Margaret of nature forcing its way through the desolation, nightingales singing. “One can’t think which is the more absurd,” he wrote, “War or Nature”. He took to oils for the first time, his brush strokes suddenly urgent and ferocious, and became an official war artist.
In the monumental Menin Road he was commissioned to do, the exhibition would have us believe that the spiky shards of trees standing out of the mud represent tombstones for the human dead. Just as likely is that they are the stoical guardians of this transformed place whose restoration they will eventually oversee, as in We are making a new world of a few months earlier in which melancholy stumps crowd together to reach out of the diabolical green slime into a pale blue sky.
Nash was a tyro painter in 1914 and emerged transformed in 1918, as most survivors did, especially artists. “Thenceforth the whole savour of living, and the nature of my work, seemed directly affected,” he wrote in the unpublished version of his autobiography, Outline. “I was launched into a turbulent sea where the dramatic adventures of life and art were breaking anew”. He suffered with depression and from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Still clinging to the English landscape, he looked for a style. There are hints of Cubism, Vorticism and Abstractism, and stimulated by the sea at Dymchurch in Kent his stark Winter Sea began as a sketch in 1925 that was finally resolved as perhaps his most powerful oil painting 12 years later. Through those years he and Margaret travelled the Mediterranean and, inspired by de Chirico, he embraced surrealism – the mysterious Blue House on the Shore of 1931 comes from one of these trips – and the geometric personalities of architecture became a feature of his work.
Nash began to bring landscapes into this studio as still lifes, and the displacement of objects that changes their nature fascinated him. The exhibition has a remarkable find from the period, a wood, ivory and stone abstract construction called Moon Aviary which had been lost since 1943 and found recently in pieces in a cardboard box; it is based on Mansions of the Dead, a 1932 watercolour shown nearby.
Showing in Recent Tendencies in British Painting at Tooth’s Gallery in 1931 he realised that he was not alone in striving for new inspiration; he formed a group called Unit One including John Armstrong, Edward Burra, Tristram Hillier, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, declaring in a letter to The Times that they were “the expression of a truly contemporary spirit, for that thing which is recognised as peculiarly of today…”. Within two years Unit One had broken up. Nash felt divorced from his beloved countryside, an affinity rekindled by moving to Wiltshire.
When his second tour as a war artist came around in 1940, Nash’s preoccupation with flight and surreal eye take on a mordant nature and hark back to his earlier experiences: the wreckage of war planes adding to the landscape and the mass grave of German aircraft in Totes Meer in 1940-41 being an uncanny evocation of Winter Sea. Even his most famous painting, Battle of Britain of 1941, in which the turmoil in the sky contrasts with the stillness of the earth beneath, reaches back to the lyrical Mackerel Sky of 1917.
The exhibition points to Paul Nash’s international importance, but instead it reveals the complexity of a great British artist of the 20th century, one who despised conflict but responded positively to it twice, and felt lost without it.
