Paul Nash:- Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape
23 July – 19 October 2003
Admission £4, concessions £3

TATE Liverpool is pleased to present the first major survey exhibition of Paul Nash in Britain since 1989. Major cycles of paintings are shown together for the first time since they were completed alongside a previously unseen selection of Nash’s photographs and archive material from the Tate Collection.  

Paul Nash is recognised as a major British painter of the twentieth century, and the most important landscape painter of the pre-Second World War period. Nash first came to prominence with his devastating canvases directly from the First World War battle-lines; shocking the nation with his depiction of the war-ravaged landscape of the trenches. He absorbed the various influences of the European avant-garde, such as abstraction and Surrealism, and worked with Herbert Read and Ben Nicholson, among others, as pioneers of modernism in Britain. The influence of Surrealism provided a new direction for Nash’s work and provoked his interest in the mystical and symbolic power of the landscape. The cycles of the moon and the seasons, of death and rebirth, decay and renewal were dominant themes in his great painting cycles of the 1930s and 1940s. The onset of the Second World War brought home Nash’s other major preoccupation during his final years: the impact of man upon nature, of technological progress on ancient culture. Nash died in 1946.

The exhibition follows a loose chronology, but focuses on Nash’s key cycles of landscape painting: the First World War landscapes; the Dymchurch series; the dream landscapes; the Megaliths series; the Vernal Equinox and Moon paintings; Second World War canvases; and finally the transcendent Sunflower sequence. Bringing together paintings, works on paper, photographs and rare archive material, this exhibition offers a unique opportunity to trace the development of ideas and subtle stylistic progression from Nash’s early to mature work.

Underpinning the exhibition is the examination of Nash’s life-long preoccupation with landscape and nature in the light of debates about ‘Englishness’ and the development of national sensibility during the inter-war years. The exhibition looks at the tension between an increased fascination for prehistoric culture and monuments, the rise of heritage preservation and the artistic interest in ‘primitive’ forms, and the invocation of the ‘modern’ – industrialisation, new technology and the machine aesthetic. The exhibition explores Nash’s unique fusion of ancient and modern, and his development of a neo-Romantic landscape painting which both looked back to the humanist English landscape tradition and forward to the technological age.