ART
Paul Nash : A Memorial Exhibition at the Tate Gallery.
" LAST summer," wrote Paul Nash in 1934, " I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up, miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, remnants of the avenue of stones which led to the Great Circle. A mile away a green pyramid casts its gigantic shadow. In the hedge, at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation." The sum of the exhibition at the Tate is Nash's gradual solution of this equation, and it is, to me, as complete a solution as any artist could achieve in this age. The heavy, clump-topped hills, the• lightly sleeping earth of those strange parts of England which remember the rituals of pre-history —areas of country which can project a nostalgia so potent that the casual visitor shuns them at dusk and only the initiate is at peace— these are also components in the equation which Paul Nash made his own. These places are the setting for the mysterious lives of those inanimate objects whose imprisoned vitality Nash understood and whose indestructible personalities he alone has truly portrayed —stones, roots, fungoids, seeds and withered leaves, alive out of time, in deafening silence. It is rare that any human being trespasses upon the Nash land- scape, unless some occasional armoured soldier intrudes among pro- testing tree-stumps. In time of war human flotsam is present throughout Nash's work, but, discarded and forgotten, the rusting skeleton and the crumpled aeroplane assume in his landscape the same bleak place as the megalith. And it is this—the confession of the living stone, the secret behaviour of the shattered tree-trunk- which is Nash's great contribution to the poetic content of painting. He was the pioneer of a whole aspect of British painting which is now familiar to us. Sutherland's ferocious tree-forms owe much to Nash, and many of the younger painters are in his debt.
Paul Nash's considerable achievement in applied design and graphic art is not fully represented in the present exhibition, so I must leave them unreviewed, and I regret that I have not even sufficient space to write at length of his long and consistent develop- ment as a painter. The English watercolour tradition was important to him, for he was an artist unusually conscious of national charac- teristics. He understood his England in terms of Blake's Albion as a country possessed of a great spiritual personality,. and Blake's influence—in his several capacities as poet, painter and mystic—upon Nash must have been considerable. Cezanne must also have been important to Nash, and both cubism and surrealism were influences which played a part in the solution of the personal equation. The surprising juxtapositions of unexpected objects which were to the surrealists a vehicle for nightmare became in Nash's hands a method of underlining the poetic life of the inanimate.
His watercolour technique—and he was perhaps the most consis- tently fine watercolourist of the twentieth century—has about it the brooding deliberation of Cezanne as opposed to the slop and splash of some of his immediate English predecessors. He had no reason to hurry or to " catch effects " ; his hills and trees change only with the passage of an equinox, not with the passing of a cloud. For this reason,- perhaps, his world was sometimes a trifle cold, and his landscape slept in wintry majesty. But during the last ten years, and particularly in arlandscape series concerned with the phases of the moon painted since 1942,, the equation is completely solved. The watercolour and oil techniques, sometimes divergent before, are here unified, and all the hard strength of design, which was often stressed in some of the earlier pictures, is here transmuted into strength of vision. It is as if the equation solved caught fire. The room in which these pictures hang is lit by them with an incan-
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