war painting extinction occupation sentiment
identity | landscape by will craig
going modern and being British critical geographies in the art of Paul Nash
“[…]to go modern and still ‘be British’ is a question vexing quite a few people today. We may see the struggle going on behind various masks, both animate and inanimate; in the faces of elderly painters and young architects, manufacturers, shop windows, facades of buildings…This is serious we say, we are at war, don’t you see, we are at war with ourselves.” — Paul Nash
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William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ can still be heard chanted at English soccer matches by die-hard supporters of ‘England’s mountains green’. How has this sense of landscape-based patriotism that still beats within British hearts been maintained despite the country’s rise as an industrial power? Two world wars have something to do with it. During the First World War, imagery and propaganda played a crucial role in galvanising public patriotic duty. Paul Nash, a landscape painter in a tradition strongly associated with rural romanticism, became a war artist. His war paintings reveal the contested nature of the English landscape, its uncertainty, its introversion and its resilience, compounded by war. The eighteenth century painting tradition of the picturesque, evocative and romantic, positioned the landscape as a container for memory and desire. Nash’s depictions of the British countryside refer to places he inhabited throughout his life; his appreciation for the past is tied to these places of memory. Nash sought sanctuary in the landscape,
a response and a logical consequence of the disturbance of war, something he associated with the arrival of International Modernism. 1 Although an escape to landscape could be seen as English sentimentalism, on closer inspection his work itself harbours disturbances that generate a feeling of placelessness through uncanny depictions of the land. Nash uses a traditional medium, painting, to depict a reorganisation of the landscape through modern processes, symbolising a contemporary, territorial shift.
1 Being that English Landscape Painting or the Picturesque is a tradition that developed primarily in the south of England, where Nash was primarily focused, the term is regional-specific (however, there is debate about whether the common terminology should be adapted, not just a reference to England as a whole). Curiously, Nash mentions Britain, which is perhaps an attempt to present a more modern or unified nation, responding to the calls of an international movement,‘Britain’ hsving more appeal globally, in an historic, imperial sense.
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