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Territories The First World War planted the beginnings of a critical geography, breaching territories and effectively eradicating localities to a tabula rasa . In Nash’s turbulent mind the war was paralleled by a threatening interplay of modern effects on the landscape, equal to a loss of territory. The re-mapping of the countryside had enduring consequences for cultural consciousness traditionally embedded in the soil. The common thread in the discussion of Nash relates landscape, territories, war and settlement as universal phenomena. However, Nash’s sense of fear (of invasion) combined with a sense of duty (or patriotism) for England is also significant. The Picturesque was a movement originating in England, founded on the basis of ‘moving through’ the landscape. On one hand, Nash seems to be an evolution (or response) to the Picturesque. On the other hand, human response to war is arguably universal and it could also be said that the phenomenon of a ‘World War’ supports this. Sigmund Freud discussed a universal emotional response to War through
Fig. 1 Paul Nash, Pyramids in the Sea , 1912. Tate, London An island fortress, English and resistant, set against the sea and the waves, has risen to form the bond of Englishness to the land, and to subdue the sea, a foreign, invading enemy.
cause and effect: aggressive tendencies repressed in people and society. There is clearly a tension in Nash as an Englishman ‘going forward’ to embrace the modern era. Conflict experienced by those at the Front intensified the desire for both England and Home. But the totalising experience of the War was evident both at home and abroad; the actual effect was of a dissolution of place. Nash painted the war vividly in all its brutality. He depicts an uninhabited landscape of human suffering; nature and modernity collide to leave a timeless, human-less vacuum. Modernity, in the form of war, is perceived as an aggressor towards a landscape continually under territorial threat.
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