David Boyd Haycock - A Crisis of Brilliance
Paul Nash
Paul Nash (1889-1946): Born in London, but with his roots
and his heart deep in the English countryside, Nash took late to art. He spent
only a year at the Slade, as he struggled with its demands of meticulous figure
drawing. At the advice of the aged painter William Blake Richmond, he ‘went
in for Nature’, with remarkable results. By the start of the Great War,
his work was gathering interest from collectors.
Sent to the Front in 1917 as an infantry officer, on the suggestion of Richard
Nevinson he succeeded in becoming an Official War Artist. In a letter from the
Front to his wife, he told her: ‘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.’
In 1918 Ezra Pound wrote that Nash’s ‘Void of War’ exhibition
had probably been ‘the best show of war art … that we have had’.