By Chloe Trainor
“No pen or drawing can convey this country . . . 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 . . . the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease . . . 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 for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”
So wrote Paul Nash in a letter from the front to his wife Margaret, where he was working as an official war artist. Initially serving in a combatant role, Nash was wounded in Ypres in 1917, and was returned home to Britain. However, he requested to return to the front as an artist, where he assumed the responsibility of documenting within his paintings the horrors he observed. In claiming that the message of his work was ‘feeble’ and ‘inarticulate’, Nash was not reflecting upon the limitations of his skill as an artist; rather, his words revealed his own inability to properly comprehend the scale and intensity of trauma and suffering he had both observed, and experienced. Nash’s work signalled a new approach to documenting war in art; it was no longer heroic, and in pieces such as We are Making a New World (1918), Nash’s condemnation of war is observed in the ironic optimism of the title juxtaposed against the reality of his barren, wasted landscape. His work was potent and honest in its brutal expression of war, and testament to his enduring legacy as an artist is evidenced in the Tate Britain’s most recent exhibition of his work.
The subject matter of Nash’s art from this period reveal a man struggling to come to terms with the unimaginable horror he has witnessed. Nash tried to give expression to the unutterable, overwhelming pain and mental exhaustion which ravished the minds of so many, packaged in medicalised terms like ‘shell shock’ and ‘war neurosis’, which failed to do justice to the experience of those who suffered. Traditionally a landscape artist, people were rarely the subject of Nash’s work, and where they do feature they are often faceless, remote characters -ghost-like, in fact, as Andrew Graham-Dixon observes in his BBC4 documentary British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash. Their ghostly appearance not only alludes to the war dead, but to the war broken, and in his decision to depict featureless, expressionless faces in paintings like The Menin Road (1919), I think Nash observes the impossibility of ever properly being able to convey in painting the faces of men who were overcome by feelings of fear, anger, hopelessness, and despair. Instead, the landscape of war is made to speak of their experience; the dislocation from a familiar way of life is confirmed in the desolation of their surroundings. In We are Making a New World the sky is bloodied and brooding, trees stand like fractured, broken stumps, and the earth itself is pock-marked and oozing, littered with craters left by shells. Whilst people are often not present in the work of Paul Nash, human suffering nearly always is.
