In 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be British?’ — a conundrum that still perplexes the national consciousness more than 80 years later. It is true that the artist himself answered that query with an emphatic ‘yes’. But, as the fine exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear, his modernism was deeply traditional.
The truth is that Nash (1889–1946) was what the author Alexandra Harris has termed a ‘romantic modern’. In other words, his art was a characteristic Anglo-Saxon attempt to have things both ways. Equally typically, he managed to do so — but only some of the time.
Nash’s early drawings and watercolours, done in his early twenties, reveal his starting point. Most are landscapes of his native Buckinghamshire and, in one case, ‘Wittenham Clumps’ (1913), an Iron Age hill fort near Didcot that continued to haunt Nash’s imagination for the rest of his life.
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