| Date | 30 August 2013 |
|---|---|
| Source | Slough Observer |
| Reference | VP-0049 |
| Volume | Views of the Past |
| Collection | Press Clippings |
Transcript
Artist’s portrayal of war
Email Elias with feedback and your memories on observernews@berksmedia.co.uk
AS WE approach the centenary of WW1, I thought it might be interesting to pay tribute to an artist buried in Langley Churchyard.
Paul Nash was a revolutionary artist who was on active duty during the war.
Born in London in May, 1889, he was the son of a successful lawyer and a mentally unstable mother who died in a mental asylum in 1910.
Nash was brought up in Langley and paintings from his garden featured in his later life.
His family intended him to take up a career in the Navy but Nash failed his exams and instead decided to study art.
He was advised by the artist William Rothenstein to study at the Slade School of Art where he enrolled in 1910.
At this time, Slade had a number of students studying there who were to become household names including Augustus John, Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler to name a few.
In 1914, Nash married Margaret Odeh, a suffragette.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted for the Artist’s Rifles and was sent to the Western Front in 1917 where he later became an official war artist.
His early sketches were then turned into oil paintings which included The Menin Road, We Are Making a New World, The Ypres Salient at Night and Spring in the Trenches.
They are among the most powerful and enduring images of the Great War painted by an English artist.
He wrote the following from the front on November 16, 1917 – “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.”
After the war, Nash became a pioneer of the modernist movement and promoted the avant-garde styles of surrealism and abstraction, which led to the revitalisation of British art together with artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
Nash went on to be a war artist in the Second World War and, towards the end of his life, was influenced by William Blake – in particular his poem: ‘Ah! The Sunflower’.
Nash died in 1946 after catching pneumonia and is buried in Langley Churchyard.
ART PIONEER: The grave of Paul Nash in Langley Churchyard.
Images
