{"id":197,"date":"2016-11-10T18:43:57","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T18:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentmedhist\/?p=197"},"modified":"2016-11-11T09:38:29","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T09:38:29","slug":"faceless-suffering-paul-nash-and-the-landscape-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kentmedhist\/faceless-suffering-paul-nash-and-the-landscape-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Nash and the Landscape of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Chloe Trainor<\/em><\/p>\n

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“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\u2019s 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.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0combatant 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 \u2018feeble\u2019 and \u2018inarticulate\u2019, 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\u2019s 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<\/em> (1918), Nash\u2019s 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\u2019s most recent exhibition of his work.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0medicalised 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\u00a0 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<\/a>. <\/em>Their ghostly appearance not only alludes to the war dead, but to the war broken, and in his decision to depict\u00a0featureless, expressionless faces in paintings like The Menin Road <\/em>(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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/a>
The Menin Road<\/strong> (Art.IWM ART 2242) image: A devastated battlefield pocked with rain-filled shell-holes, flooded trenches and shattered trees lit by unearthly beams of light from an apocalyptic sky. Two figures pick their way along a tree-lined road, the road punctuated by shell-holes and lined by tree stumps. The foreground is filled with concrete blocks, barbed wire and corrugated iron, while columns of mud from artillery fire rise up in the background. Copyright: \u00a9 IWM. Original Source: http:\/\/www.iwm.org.uk\/collections\/item\/object\/20087<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"We<\/a>
We are Making a New World<\/strong> (Art.IWM ART 1146) image: The view over a desolate landscape with shattered trees, the earth a mass of shell holes. The sun hangs high in the sky, beams of light shining down through heavy, earth-coloured clouds. Copyright: \u00a9 IWM. Original Source: http:\/\/www.iwm.org.uk\/collections\/item\/object\/20070<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"The<\/a>
The Mule Track<\/strong> (Art.IWM ART 1153) image: The view across a battlefield undergoing heavy bombardment. The shattered landscape is disected by an angular duckboard path, along which a mule train is travelling, their small figues just visible in the distance. The animals rear and panic at a nearby explosion as the water from a flooded trench shoots up from the surface. In the sky there are large clouds of yellow and grey coloured smoke, with rubble flying high into the air in the foreground. Copyright: \u00a9 IWM. Original Source: http:\/\/www.iwm.org.uk\/collections\/item\/object\/20078<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"A<\/a>
A Howitzer Firing<\/strong> (Art.IWM ART 1152) image: A scene with four British artillerymen firing a Howitzer gun. They stand beneath a canopy of camoflage netting. To the right a blast of light erupts from the muzzle of the gun, and the men on the left shield their faces from the brightness. Copyright: \u00a9 IWM. Original Source: http:\/\/www.iwm.org.uk\/collections\/item\/object\/20077<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"The<\/a>
The Ypres Salient at Night<\/strong> (Art.IWM ART 1145) image: A night scene showing three soldiers on the fire step of a trench surprised by a brilliant star shell lighting up the view over the battlefield. On the left there is a flooded shell-hole, beyond which stand three other soldiers, overlooked by a woodland of tree stumps. Copyright: \u00a9 IWM. Original Source: http:\/\/www.iwm.org.uk\/collections\/item\/object\/20069<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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