Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain

The first room in the Ruin Lust exhibition at the Tate Britain was sparsely populated with paintings. But each provided a key to themes which would be explored in subsequent rooms. They also gave some idea as to the range of subject matter, style and historical span which we could expect. John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum confronted us with the process of ruination in full epic widescreen. As in any disaster film, the pleasurable terrors of natural cataclysm visited upon the grand edifices of human civilisation in its fullest flowering are gleefully exploited. Figures fleeing in the foreground are overwhelmed by the rivers of bubbling magma and furious rain of burning rock plummeting from the sky. Even tinier figures in the middle distance have probably had it, no-name extras hired to scream and be anonymously buried or swallowed up by the roiling and rifting landscape.

This aestheticisation of disaster, offered up as thrilling spectacle, is later reflected upon in the dark photographic prints of Tacita Dean. The title of the series included here, The Russian Ending, directly invokes the cinematic quality of such images. It refers to the alternate cuts of films which distributors produced for Finnish and Russian markets. The latter emphasised more fatalistic, doom-laden conclusions, which they evidently thought would suit the Russian mindset. Dean’s beautifully reproduced images of shipwrecks, polluted cityscapes, battlefields strewn with the shells of bombed out vehicles and, indeed, erupting volcanoes are shaded in a sooty chiaroscuro, as if they were ingrained with smoke and ashes. Scrawled descriptions over various elements of the scene add to the impression that these are directed disasters, carefully staged and photographed for the pleasure of the viewer.

Rachel Whiteread also capture the moment of destruction, of ruination, in her series of photographs of high-rise estates being detonated. The titles include lengthy addresses, including postcodes. There are shots of the buildings in an intact state at the time at which they were condemned. They are like pre-ruins, the undocumented time inbetween a steady decline towards final dramatic collapse in dynamite clap and brick dust cloud.

Back in the introductory atrium, Jane and Louise Wilson’s Azeville (2006) and The Aftermath are large black photographs in which massive concrete bunkers, remnants of wars and occupations, fill the frame with brooding, ominous intensity. They are linear cliffs and outcrops, geometrically sheared formations which seem to form new landscape features. The incursions of nature into these man-made structures, in the guise of weathering, the drifting of sand, the mottling of moss and lichen, and the fringing of grass and weeds, begins to blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. They are like blocks of frozen time, deposits left by a particular historical moment. Despite their apparent indestructible solidity, they are themselves subject, as is everything, to the processes of time.

Paul Nash - Equivalents for Megaliths

Other artists also explore the congruence of the natural landscape with monumental human constructions. The works in the section titled On Land (presumably a reference to Brian Eno’s ambient evocation of fogbound landscapes) conjure up the spirit of place, the absorption of the marks of human history and presence into the contours of the land. Such marks respond to the landscape even as they shape it. Nature always triumphs in the end, steadily growing over and covering human endeavours to hold the cyclical processes of growth and decay at bay. Ruin and disaster create a borderland in which civilisation and the wild reconnect with each other amongst the rubble. The ancient landscapes of the south are invoked in Paul Nash’s Equivalents for Megaliths and Pillar and Moon. The surreal transformation of the harvest fields in the former suggests and affinity between the human imagination and certain landscapes, a profound sense of connection and attachment. Megalithic stone is here replaced with less substantial grids and rolls, suggestive of geometrical harvest stacks. They look like ideal forms, plans waiting to be given substance with the appropriate material. They are templates for the shapes and objects appropriate for a particular place and time, whether that be harvest stacks or sarsen stones. The harvested shapes will decay much more quickly, or be summarily dismantled. Time for these equivalents is considerably more constricted. The stone globe topping the wall pillar in the latter painting echoes the moon’s sphere in the sky above. The built landscape and the natural cycles are linked, the ruinous processes of time once more invoked. Time is inherent in both paintings: seasonal time, historical time and geological time. Megalithic sites have become so much a part of the British landscape, permanently inscribed onto the contours of OS maps, that they appear as an expression of it; Ruins which have come to seem like expressive natural outcroppings of the land.

Joe Tilson also uses the ancient landscape of southern Britain as the basis of his Wessex Portfolio series. With their stacked arrays of photographs and graphic images, associatively linking into boldly iconographic representations of Stonehenge, Cerne Abbas, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington, Avebury and Glastonbury, these attempt to codify the power of these sites. Details such as spiral patterns (the inwardly coiling pathways of the brain), sketches of archaeological finds, starry backdrops and drawings of moths and bees give a particularity which contrasts with the specific view, focussing inward or beyond and bringing individual vision or universal perspective to bear. As a whole, they offer some kind of diagrammatic distillation of the affective spell of these places. They have gone beyond the notion of the ruin and have become part of a collective inner landscape, one where the distinction between the natural and the artificial has been almost wholly dispelled.

Paul Nash - The Fertile Image (with Monster Field on the cover)

Paul Nash further explores the surreal quality of the southern English landscape, and the presence of man within it, in a series of his photographs included here (some of which were also published in his 1951 book Fertile Image). Human artefacts and tools become strange and purposelessly abstract when stranded and abandoned within natural surrounds, or within wilds which have grown up around them. They become markers of boundary zones between the wild and the domestic, exterior and interior worlds. Iron Post, Bedhead and Stone Wall in particular points to the borders of unconscious dreamworlds with its particular assemblage. A garden roller is a potent symbol in its ruinous, rusted state. A tool intended to control and tame wild nature, it is now subject to its erosive forces. Nash’s fallen tree monsters indicate the ways in which ruinous natural forms arouse the active and alert imagination.

John Sell Cotman - Llanthony Abbey

Paintings of picturesque ruin often fixed upon the shattered shells of monasteries as their objects of fascination. Llanthony Abbey in Wales, set with a lush river valley, was a particular favourite, and views by Turner, John Sell Cottman and Joseph Clarendon Smith were included here. Leafy branch and vine cover patches of crumbling masonry, both furthering its eventual disintegration and helping in the short term to bind sections of wall together. The passage of time and history is made manifest and the irrevocable triumph of nature over civilisation is evoked. Abbeys were subject to deliberate ruination during the Reformation, and stand as symbols of the fragility of human ideas, beliefs and social and political structures. No matter how fixed and unassailable they might appear at any given moment, they will eventually fall.

Elswhere, the idea of the picturesque and the mystical sense of identity attached to the British landscape, along with the dreamy and uncritical veneration which it can arouse, are satirised. Keith Arnatt uses the acronym AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) with maximal irony in his series of photographs from 1982-4. He studiously avoids picturesque scenes, seeking out what lies behind or just beyond such carefully framed compositions. The workings behind the stage sets, so to speak. His countryside is grubbily mundane and poverty-worn. Human incursions into the natural world are not depicted as harmonious or romantic. They are despoliations, falling into a ruinous and rubbish strewn state which no one is likely to linger and admire.

John Latham’s Five Sisters Bing (1976) is a highly artificial landscape whose pyramidally peaked mountain range is formed of leather-bound books whose covers are redolent of classic literature, and whose bedrock is a bound edition of a year’s copies of The Times. An establishment landscape to be imposed on the spoil mountains left by departed industry. The very idea of a monument, for which this was a proposal, is mocked, the motives for its construction viewed with the greatest suspicion. David Shrigley, meanwhile, erects an instant prefab mini-leisure centre on the site of demolished Victorian housing, an amusing satire on reflexive 'redevelopment'. There is a serious point beneath the surface titters. Organised leisure will be the new currency in this street where people once organised their own communal activities.

Graham Sutherland - Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse

War is a time of rupture and upheaval, and creates its own instant overnight ruins. The shock of familiar buildings and cityscapes transformed with such sudden violence provokes an effect of surreal dislocation. British artists of a surrealist bent adapted their eye for strange and psychologically resonant transformations and realignments of the normal world and trained it on scenes in which that safe normality had been savagely blown apart. Surrealism during wartime becomes closer to realism, the surrealist’s attraction towards destruction guiltily fulfilled. Graham Sutherland, in his Devastation 1941: East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse, finds his characteristic fusion of natural and mechanical forms in the exposed rolls of paper. Stacked on top of one another and exposed to the elements, they look like the stripped trunks of felled trees mournfully laid out amongst broken machinery. In Muirhead Bone’s Torpedoed Oil Tanker (1940), the gargantuan vessel resembles a beached leviathan, the efflorescent rent in the side a killing wound. Metal has been bent and flayed, peeled back like hard, leathery skin. In John Armstrong’s Coggeshall Church, Essex (1940), bomb damage to the tower has revealed a structural cross-section, as if we were looking at an architectural illustration. The damage here is very neat and precise. It could almost be a part of an act of reconstruction rather than destruction. John Piper’s St Mary le Port, Bristol records the jagged masonry bones of one of the city’s churches in much the same way as he painted the ruins of country mansions. Another Paul Nash photograph, taken at the Cowley Dump in Oxfordshire in 1940, gazes upon a cresting slope of wrecked airplane husks and dismembered parts. It form the basis for what is probably his best-known Second World War painting, which found him in full-blown surrealist mode: Totes Meer (Dead Sea) of 1941. The jumbled assemblage of aircraft parts displays an angular modernist fragmentation, here recorded as observed reality rather than formal abstraction, however. It looks like the result of a monstrous collision. The twisted metal precariously piled up in grinding disarray is darkly radiant with the violent spirit of death and destruction; that of the planes, their crews and of the destruction which they in turn had wrought. It is an instant, discomforting and unheroic monument.

John Constable - Sketch for Hadleigh Castle

The last of the introductory pictures in the exhibition’s atrium was John Constable’s Sketch for Hadleigh Castle. The ruin here is stridently Romantic, a lonely tower under rainswept skies by a storm-troubled sea. The unfinished nature of the picture gives it a rough form which proves entirely apposite for the mood of the scene. Though never intended to be viewed as a work in itself, it is nevertheless unconsciously modern in approach. It anticipates the way in which other works in the exhibition convey a ruinous aspect through rough, unrefined form; compositions left deliberately ragged around the edges, dissolving or thickening into semi-abstraction. JMW Turner also anticipates modern styles in his watercolour study Holy Island Cathedral. The ruined arch emerges from hazy and watery blue surrounds like some sunken Ys rising from the depths. We can imagine the picture accompanied by the tolling of Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie. Turner’s Temple of Poseidon is another Romantic clifftop ruin of the imagination. Its tempestuous roughness and noisy drama, with violent clouds gathering, stabbed through by a gash of lightning, has none of the classical equanimity its title might suggest. The gathering storm suggests that the process of ruination is ongoing, and the dogs howling out across the building waves mourn for their lost master.

JMW Turner - Holy Island

John Piper’s paintings of dilapidated country houses often have the look of collages, or broadly outlined stage sets. Flat masses of masonry facades are set off against highly contrasted backgrounds, the muted or darkly burnished colours suggesting burnt surfaces or age-accumulated patinas of lichen or moss. They are evocative backdrops in front of which stylised and fancifully costumed masques seem designed to unfold. The Forum (1961) sees him adopting the subject matter of the classical Roman ruin. He pushes the composition towards abstraction with splashes, dabs, dashed strokes and tangles of scraped swirl. Shapes suggestive of classical architectural form rise from or are imposed upon this chaos, remains of the old city amongst rubble and scrubby growth.

Leon Kossoff - Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974

Leon Kossoff’s Demolition of the Old House Dalston Road 1974 is almost topographical in its roughness of form. Paint is built up in thick layers like dried ridges of mud. The picture could almost have been created from the mixed dust and debris of the site it depicts. Scores in the paint further the sense of geological formations, resembling weather cracking beginning to shear and fragment the surface. It’s a cousin to Frank Auerbach’s Maples Demolition Euston Road, painted in 1960, and which employs a similarly thick layering of paint to create a gnarled and glutinous dimensionality. Laura Oldfield Ford’s meticulously drafted depictions of post-war housing estates and their boundaries are smeared with blurred washes of pink in what at first appears a deliberate act of vandalism. These translucent surface blemishes resemble marks of attempted erasure, the traces left on walls after graffiti has been washed off. But scrawled screeds stubbornly remain written across areas of the paintings, commentaries, observations and clouds of drifting thought and emotion made manifest. The writing on the paintings is not defacement, rather it is an attempt at giving the local spirit expression.

In the case of Tacita Dean’s film Kodak, the medium is in itself the substance of ruin, or of the abandonment which presages ruin. It documents an ending, a moment of historical and cultural transition. These are the final days of the Kodak film manufacturing plant, and part of Dean’s film is printed on the last black and white 16mm stock to be produced there. It thus becomes a record of its own obsolescence and disappearance, a last spectral testament. The beauty of the images make this a melancholy farewell, an elegy to the passing of a particular form of vision from the world.

Piranesi - Pyramid of Gaius Cestius

The first pictures greeting the visitor as they entered the main body of the exhibition weren’t by British artists, and therefore seemed set a little apart. They were essentially more introductory works, prefatory images which primed us further for what was to come. They were two of Piranesi’s prints of Rome. They were placed by the entrance to the first room because of their formative influence on the development of an aesthetic appreciation of ruins. The 18th century Views of Rome depict the classical buildings in a detailed and clearly delineated fashion, outlines boldly etched and impressed on the paper with black ink. They bring a sense of solidity to the cracked, crumbling and vine-blotched masses of the Colosseum (1760-78) and the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius (1755). A degree of classical order and proportion is maintained, but tempered with the disorder of ruination and the reintroduction of a nature formerly held firmly at bay. There is a state of balance in place, but it is temporary. The Piranesi etchings set the templates for visions of cities and civilisations decaying and passing away, leaving evocatively empty shells to spark the curiosity of future travellers who look upon them.

Gustave Doré - The New Zealander

There was a subset of pictures here which imagined the abandoned ruins of futurity. These are the cityscapes of post-catastrophe science fiction which have fascinated writers, artists and, latterly, film-makers from the Romantic period onwards. In 1872, Gustave Doré provided dark and richly atmospheric engravings for London: A Pilgrimage, a travel book written by Blanchard Jerrold. The final plate is called The New Zealander. It depicts the future wanderer seated on a chunk of masonry from the collapsed London Bridge on the south side of the river, looking across at the ruins of the city. The dome of St Paul’s has collapsed inward; the cracked or fallen dome is a commonplace in depictions of future ruin. As an overarching symbol of ordered and classical civilisation and achievement, it is the perfect subject for significant destruction and continued disrepair. Jerrold locates the source of the imaginary scene in ‘Macaulay’s dream of the far future, with the tourist New Zealander upon the broken parapets, contemplating something matching “the glory that was Greece – the grandeur that was Rome”’. Thomas ‘Lord’ Macaulay’s quote about the New Zealander was instantly familiar to many at the time. At the conclusion to a book review in an 1840 edition of the Edinburgh Review, he had contemplated the continuation of Roman civilisation (the book in question was a History of the Popes) and the fall of the post-Reformation English protestant society. It was in such a context that he dreamed of a time when ‘some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's'. It was an image which caught the imagination of the reading public, long after the substance of the review was forgotten, and was widely, even profligately cited. The New Zealander became a byword for a future observer of fallen London. Doré’s print looked forward to look back to Piranesi’s etchings of Rome.

Joseph Michael Gandy - An Imagined View of the Bank of England in Ruins

Future ruination or abandonment became a part of a number of works of fiction in the 19th century as the industrialised city exploded outward and swallowed people up wholesale with a smoky belch. There was an element of wish-fulfilment in Richard Jeffries’ After London, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, William Morris’ News from Nowhere, H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine (with its emblematic scene set in a crumbling future museum), and M.P.Shiel’s 1901 novel The Purple Cloud. The destruction of the new polluted, overpopulated cities offered the possibility of new beginnings, the envisaging of a wholesale change of direction. When the architect John Soane designed his classically solid and rational Bank of England buildings, he commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to depict them as future ruins, his domes and ceilings cracked and holed, letting in the elements to complete the levelling. It was an act of humility in a profession which can easily breed megalomaniac vision and vaulted hubris. But it also acknowledged the impermanence of the civilisation for which this symbolically massive and imposing structure served as a modern temple. This too shall pass, he seems to be saying, as the same time recognising the transience of his existence and the eventual disappearance of all the ideas and endeavours which made up and gave purpose to his lifetime. Perhaps it was this melancholy awareness that led him to collect, hoard and catalogue so many pieces of ruined masonry and statuary. He filled every nook and purpose-built shelf of his London house with them until he was effectively living in a crowded museum of his own curation. The house really is a museum now, and an utterly bewitching one at that, particularly as dusk draws in.

James Boswell - The Fall of London: The Horseguard

James Boswell’s The Fall of London (1933) is a series of smokily smudged black and white lithographs depicting the fight for the city during a fascist invasion. It gives alarming substance to the fears (or for some, the hopes) arising from the spread of fascism across the continent. They are a contemporary variant on the tales of German invasion which were widespread during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the best known of which is George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking. A collection of these stories was gathered together by Michael Moorcock in the 1977 anthology England Invaded, which includes Blyde Mudersnook’s 1911 Strand tale When the New Zealander Comes – a fulfilment of Macaulay’s prophetic imagining. Boswell’s stark, graphically striking images are startling bleak. Human beings are reduced to ragdoll figures cast broken-limbed onto piles of rubble or hung crook-necked from lampposts, scuttling, crablike creatures in armoured carapaces, pointed guns like gesticulating claws, or fearful shadow runners, hunched, tensed and showing a flash of a face alert with blank paranoia. They are vaguely reminiscent of David Lloyd’s artwork for Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (the monochrome version as originally published in Warrior comic), for which these lithographs could be viewed as a prelude in 8 snapshots.

Visions of the future themselves become outmoded and redundant, and looking back on them is like contemplating the ruins of futures past. This is what Gerard Byrne does in his video piece 1984 and Beyond, which restages a 1963 discussion between 12 science fiction writers, the results of which were published in Playboy. They attempted between them to envisage possible futures. The writers involved were among the cream of the 50s generation who prided themselves on their awareness of the social and political currents of the time. They were pulp philosophers possessed of varying degrees of insight. Some of their ideas are interesting, some are definitely of their time. The writers in question were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, William Tenn, A.E.Van Vogt, Algis Budrys, Theodore Sturgeon (one of the more liberal members of this group), Frederik Pohl, Rod Serling (the Twilight Zone writer and producer), James Blish (who had a rare intellectual rigour) and Poul Anderson. There is a faded nostalgia inherent in such a resurrection of old dreams. A yearning ache for a time when the future was an exciting prospect, full of rapidly expanding and seemingly limitless utopian potential; a future which could be born from the minds of a convocation of pipe smoking science fiction writers.

The works in the final room, Cities in Dust, drive the nails into the coffin of any such post-war utopian dreams of shining ziggurats and coiling skyways. John Riddy’s London (Weston Street) from 2008 focuses on an expanse of brickwork under a railway bridge. It seems to contain a chronicle of London’s steady decay from the mid-Victorian era onwards, written in the gradations of grime, weathering and mould, as accurately decipherable as the rings in a tree or the strata on an exposed rockface. The agit-prop art group Inventory find the decline of post-war social ideals symbolised by the worn, peeling surface of a South London housing estate map sign. They wrote their own response onto it, an angry palimpsest decrying the neglect which the ruinous map charts. Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London photos, taken between 1977-2008, view the city as a depopulated zone, abandoned by its populace, or perhaps evacuated by official mandate. It is devoid of apparent life. If there are people here, they have retreated behind their walls and are peering anxiously between the gaps in the curtains, like the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. It’s a post-punk vision of future catastrophe now, with the city as imagined by Derek Jarman in Jubilee or by Michael Moorcock in various Jerry Cornelius stories.

Keith Coventry - Heygate Estate

Keith Coventry’s Heygate Estate (1995) redesigns the estate map as a piece of Russian constructivism, echoing the suprematist extremes of cold abstraction to which Kazimir Malevich pushed his paintings. It plots the birth and death of modernist ideals and approaches. There is an implicit criticism of the way in which human social and individual needs were abstracted and compacted to fit the mass housing projects of the post-war period. Just as the idealism of the Russian revolution descended into totalitarian control, so the ideals of modernist housing plans and their attendant social programs tended to devolve into failing systems of control. Coventry’s work serves as a fitting end point for the exhibition. The representations of ruins we have seen have largely been palpably physical. But ruins can equally be the rubble and wreckage of ideals, philosophies and once firmly held worldviews. The salutary lesson of the ruin is that nothing lasts, all is transient. It’s a knowledge which is melancholic, but which can also offer great comfort. Everything changes, everything is renewed. In this realisation lies the curious pleasure, lustful or not, of the ruin.

Crisis of Brilliance at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery is currently hosting the exhibition A Crisis of Brilliance in the elegantly formal side rooms of its Sir John Soane designed building. The selection of paintings, drawings and letters were chosen by David Boyd Haycock, and form an accompaniment to his book of the same title. This looks at the lives and work of five artists who attended the Slade School of Art in the immediate pre-war period: Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Christopher Richard Nevinson (who chose to go by his middle name), Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. For this exhibition, Haycock has added another Slade attendee, David Bomberg. He wasn’t as closely entwined in the personal lives of this group, but his work displays a similar urge towards new forms of expression to reflect the rapid changes transforming the beginning of this turbulent new century. It’s Bomberg’s large, landmark painting In The Hold which confronts us outside the entrance to the exhibition proper, perhaps a pointer to his disconnection from the charmed (or cursed) circle. It also stands as an example of the end point of a certain branch of rigorous abstraction which some of the artists within will edge towards (although none will go this far). It also represents a total formalism which others will firmly reject, holding to the primacy and emotional impact of the subject matter of a painting or drawing. The Hold does have a subject – the work of dockers loading and unloading a ship in the East End docks. But any sense of human form or activity is splintered and reconfigured to the point of complete dissipation in the fragmenting compact lens of a prismatic grid, which regiments motion and colour into a rigorously formalised pattern – chaos contained.

The Slade School of Art had been set up with funds from the art collector Felix Slade in 1871, and soon became an alternative to the more traditional, conservative atmosphere prevailing in the Royal Academy. It looked to new developments which were taking place on the continent, and in particular in Paris. The artists here were all aware of the various forms of post-impressionism, which were given a prominent display in the exhibition organised by Roger Fry in the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910. Gertler and Nevinson started at the Slade in 1909, Nash and Carrington in the following 1910 term (Nash actually on staying for one year), and Bomberg in 1911. It was the Slade professor of drawing, Henry Tonks, who came up with the term ‘crisis of brilliance’ to describe their struggles. It was a crisis which encompassed artistic, personal and historical stresses and impetuses, all of them part of an inseparable whole. The seismic historical rupture which affected them all was, of course, the First World War, the advent of which proved to be a brutal coming of age for them, as for so many.

The six artists in the exhibition came from very different backgrounds, and the art school and the trenches were two of the few environments in which they might have been brought together at this time. Gertler and Bomberg were both the sons of poor Jewish immigrants who grew up in the East End; Gertler in Spitalfields and Bomberg in Whitechapel. They first met through their mutual use of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Library. They would each draw on their experience of Jewish life in their early, pre-war work. Gertler’s The Rabbi and his Grandchild (1913) is a touching double portrait in which the black-clad, greybearded elder is contrasted with his young granddaughter, her full red lips emphasising the bloom of her youth. His cradling of her chin seems half tender caress, half proud display of this fresh new shoot of the ancestral tree. Bomberg’s Jewish Theatre (1913) directs its attention to the audience, as Sickert had done with his music hall paintings. But Bomberg turns his dimly lit figures, outlined like Sickert’s in shades of brown, into interlocking, semi-abstract forms – the indistinguishable mass of the crowd.

Carrington grew up in a comfortable middle class household in Bedford, but found the home environment, and her mother’s Victorian Puritanism in particular, unbearably stifling, and longed to break away. Nash’s father was a barrister, and he grew up in Kensington, before the family moved to a country house in Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. He soon felt a natural affinity for this new home, and its surrounding landscape in a way that he never had for London. Nevinson’s parents were intellectuals, his father a writer and a foreign correspondent and his mother harbouring literary ambitions. They were both also active in pursuing progressive social causes, his mother becoming involved in the Suffragette movement. Both Nash’s and Nevinson’s mothers suffered from depression and anxiety, which sometimes became overwhelming (they both spent time in sanatariums). Their sons would inherit these temperamental tendencies, their moods periodically turning darkly inward. Spencer was the country boy, growing up in the village of Cookham in Berkshire, the son of successful music teacher and church organist, known to the family as ‘Par’. Cookham would remain his spiritual home and the ground for his visionary imagination throughout his life.

Richard Nevinson - Self-Portrait (1911)

These diverse characters would enjoy intense friendships and equally intense falling outs over the years. Carrington was often the catalyst. A woman of evident spirit and allure, she attracted the attentions of Nash, Nevinson and Gertler in turn. Only the pious and unworldly Spencer seemed immune to her charms. The first room in the exhibition begins with portraits and self-portraits they made of each other, captured in the full, romantic flush of fiery, enthusiastic youth. We can imagine these heads buzzing with inchoate ideas and artistic ambition, searching for inspiration and new distinct and personal means of expression. Nevinson’s sensual self-portrait in oils from 1911 sets his ruddy, full-lipped face against a black backround, his brown eyes looking appraisingly out at us from a half-profile position. With its cool insouciance, this portrait has an element of self-possession which borders on arrogance, Nevinson capturing the bullying side of his personality with disarming honesty. Stanley Spencer’s portrait in earthy red chalk from 1914 is face-on, earnest and intent. His eyes don’t look out at us like Nevinson’s, however, but seem rather to be directed elsewhere, an inwardly focussed gaze. A portrait of Nash done in pencil by Rupert Lee in 1913, which again features in the book but not the exhibition, shows off his noble profile, with its Roman nose, sloping forehead and neatly backcombed sweep of hair. Carrington’s self portrait in pencil remains unfinished, and she has a wistful look, gazing upwards as if looking out of a high window. It seems to express her self-doubts and lack of confidence in her artistic abilities. Her portrait of Gertler from 1912 has him sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired, as if he’d just woken up or was on the verge of drifting off. It has an air of relaxed intimacy about it. His portrait of her from the same year, in tempera, has a stillness and translucence which reflects the influence of the early Italian Renaissance painters which Nevinson and others looked back to for a brief period in their early development. This can also be seen in their friend John Currie’s frieze Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron, also painted in 1912. Here, Nevinson and Gertler (and their fellow Slade student Edward Wadsworth) are amongst the group re-imagined as Renaissance figures lined up against a landscape backdrop. Nevinson again looks out at us, meeting our gaze with a challenging fixity, whilst Gertler’s pale profile cuts its outline across his broad ochre cheek. This proximity expresses the close friendship the two shared in their first year at the Slade. It was a relationship which fell apart once they both became enamoured of Carrington, however.

Currie himself was an extreme embodiment of the turbulent emotional lives of these young artists, and their attempt to lead a bohemian existence for which their backgrounds had not prepared them, and to which their characters were generally ill-suited. Currie was a family man with a wife and son, but he became infatuated with one of the models from the Slade life classes, Dorothy Henry, known to all as Dolly. He embarked on an affair with her, which soon brought his marriage to an end. The relationship was stormy and unevenly balanced. Dolly had absolutely no interest in art or high-minded matters of culture. She was just a young girl, 17 when they met, who wanted a good time and a degree of social stability, and mistakenly believed that Currie was the man who might provide both. Currie was unable to see this, though, and couldn’t bring himself to bring things to a conclusion. That conclusion came instead on a violent night in October 1914 when, filled with jealousy and paranoid rage, he shot her and then himself.

Mark Gertler - Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Blue Jersey (1912)

Gertler’s portrait of Carrington from 1912, Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Blue Jersey, stands as the perfect expression of her looming presence in his life, which would dominate his world for years to come. The deep blue of the jumper, and the outline of Carrington’s body, fills the lower half of the painting, standing out in contrast to the lighter blues of the sky above. It forms a sweeping landscape horizon, from the hillside shoulders of which her head rises with the sculptural solidity and iconic clarity which would become characteristic of his human figures. The face is capped with a bobbed helmet of brown hair, which almost reaches the upper border of the picture, so that she fills up the entire frame. The cropped hair and loose, simple clothing which Carrington sported made for a striking look in the pre-war era, bold and modern and anticipating liberated 20s fashions by over a decade. It marked Carrington’s attempt to break away from the oppressive Victorian atmosphere of her upbringing. This reinvention of the self extended to her insistence on dropping the Dora and being referred to by her surname alone. She is definitely presented as something of a benevolent goddess in this painting, appearing monumental and blue eyed against the sky, a landscape in herself. Her relationship with Gertler was complex and long-lasting. She struggled to maintain a certain distance in the face of his eager, melodramatic and frequently desperate correspondence, and to hold off from any physical involvement, whilst encouraging his continued and undeniably flattering devotion. Letters from Carrington on display here show a mixture of childish playfulness, complete with charming sketches, and attempts at honest emotional articulacy. Gertler’s letters are much more intemperate, prone to wild declarations and dramatic ultimatums. Both, in their own ways, were struggling with almost constant self-doubt and the lingering legacy of the backgrounds from which they had tried to escape.

The portraits, particularly those in pencil or chalk, display the skills inculcated by the Slade’s emphasis on draughtsmanship, as overseen by Henry Tonks, an exacting and unsparingly critical taskmaster. This can be seen in Carrington’s richly detailed pen and ink drawing of Bedford Market (1912) which, with its crowded, bustling square has a multiplicity of glimpsed narratives reminiscent of Victorian paintings like William Powell Frith’s Derby Day. It suggests that she would have been a skilled book illustrator. Spencer’s pencil and ink drawing Fairy on a Water Lily (1909) also demonstrates the fine draughtsmanship honed at the Slade, and could be a plate taken from an Edwardian book of fairy tales or a George MacDonald style fantasy.

Dora Carrington - Female Figure Lying on Her Back (1912)

Life classes were also an important element of the Slade timetable, as we have learned through John Currie’s fateful dalliance with Dolly. These were segregated, men and women studying separately, a reminder that even in the supposedly bohemian environment of the art school, Victorian and Edwardian values held sway. The violent passions and all-consuming anxieties of the Slade artists and their confused romantic entanglements are better understood in the context of this pervasive moral climate. Carrington’s Female Figure Lying on Her Back (1912) is an example of such a life study, a frankly sensual portrait of a woman languorously stretched out on a bed. Her form is palely outlined against a dark background, into which her black hair blends. Her flushed face is turned away from us, her arm crooked back behind her neck, pulling her hair back to reveal a white expanse of throat. Her breast is prominently displayed, and it is this rather than her hidden face which becomes the focal point of the viewer’s gaze. It’s entirely surprising to learn that Carrington had a number of female lovers once her sexuality emerged from its fearful dormancy in the post-war period.

Dora Carrington - Lytton Strachey (1916)

Her true soulmate, however, was Lytton Strachey, the essayist and ascerbic lynchpin of the Bloomsbury set. They lived together in the large Mill House in Tidmarsh, Berkshire, which the great success of Strachey’s book of literary portraits Eminent Victorians had enabled him to buy. Carrington was utterly devoted to Strachey. As he was gay, she didn’t have to worry about the physical side of the relationship, which had proved such a cause of tension with Nevinson and Gertler. Their quiet, relaxed intimacy shines through in her portrait of Strachey from 1916, which remains her single best-known painting. He leans back, head and shoulders comfortably propped on the soft hump of a white cushion, which seems perfectly moulded to his contours. His long ginger bead lies flat and forms a continuum with the red blanket drawn around his midriff. The gently downward slope of his reclining body is interrupted by the angled, stiffly upright lines of his hands. With their long, delicate fingers, they hold open a small book, its red covers matching the colour of his coverlet. As Strachey reads his little volume, scanning eyes veiled by the round lenses of his glasses, we are invited to read him, engaged as he is in the activity which defines him as an aesthete and intellectual. It’s a portrait of a mind as much as a body, and as such stands as a perfect expression of her love for him as a person with whom she could endlessly converse and share confidences. When he died from cancer in 1932, she simply couldn’t imagine carrying on in the world without him, and shot herself a few months later.

The pre-war work of all the artists in the exhibition finds them searching for their own distinctive style, the form and subject matter which best expressed their newly coalescing worldview and artistic outlook. To reach this style, they tried on various more or less imitative guises, drawing on the new currents springing up in Paris. Nevinson concentrated on urban subjects, producing condensed industrial landscapes full of the angular blocks of warehouses and factories and the channels of canals which cut between them. Tow Path, Camden Town shows the influence of post-impressionism (via Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition) and of the London Group of which he was briefly a member (and which emerged from the Camden Town Group). A black chalk outline picture of The Lock, Camden, with its arching footbridge instantly recognisable, moves towards the futurism and vorticism which he would enthusiastically adopt with its concern with geometrical, straight-edged form. Nevinson spent some time living in Paris in 1912, where he met a number of the artists then working there, absorbing a number of new influences. The Viadiuct, Issy-les-Moulineux is a formalised landscape parcelled out into distinct blocks of colour in the manner of Cezanne, the hero of Fry and his circle and model for their new artistic ideals. Racehorse from 1913 moves further towards the abstraction implied in that painting. In Le Vieux Port (1913) he subjects his dockyard scene to cubist diffraction, the inclusion of boldly inscribed typeface numbers making the emulation of Picasso and Braque plain. The grids of the crane frames add a distinctly vorticist element, however. Dance Hall Scene translates the energy of the crowded dance floor into abstract, vorticist arcs and angles, although it should be noted that Nevinson, due to his own tactlessness and tendency to act without prior consultation was never admitted into Wyndham Lewis’ official Vorticist gang. This painting bears some resemblance to William Roberts’ The Jazz Party, painted a decade or so later in 1923, and which can be found in the Leeds Art Gallery.

Spencer abiding concern was with discovering the sacred in the everyday, and his recognition of its presence in the Cookham lanes, fields and riversides he knew so well, and in the people who inhabited the village. This was at the heart of his painting from the outset. He seemed to arrive at the Slade with his artistic intentions already fully formulated. His very first surviving painting, Two Girls and a Beehive (1910), a portrait of two Cookham sisters, is already in the style for which he would become famous. Nativity was a prize-winning painting which set the birth of Christ on what appears to be the edge of a park in Cookham. The visionary depiction of John Donne Arriving in Heaven shows a more stylised English landscape, in which the poet and those who wait to greet him on the heavenly plain are planted like blocklike and monolithic giants, megaliths with crude human features. It was hung at Roger Fry’s second post-impressonist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1912. By the time of the post-war picture Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1920), the pieces were all firmly in place: the keen sense of locality; the energetically peopled scene, with its exaggerated, slightly inflated figures; the subdued colour scheme, reminiscent of early Italian Renaissance painters (which also gives them the look of murals); and the pious but ungilded and non-ceremonial view of the divine made manifest in the ordinary.

Mark Gertler - Creation of Eve (1915)

Gertler concentrated largely on the human figure, initially painting local subjects drawn from the Jewish culture in which he’d grown up, and from the East End boxing clubs. A pastel study of a Seated Boxer from 1918 is included here. He also gained a reputation (and a steady income) for his portraits, whose solid presence and bold but sensitive colours gave them a strikingly distinctive appearance. Portrait of a Girl (1912) is one such, and gives an idea of why he was so much in demand, with its beautiful blend of autumnal tones set against a mossy green wallpaper background. He also painted more allegorical and religiously symbolic works. Fruit Sorters (1914) has a timeless and geographically non-specific feel; its orchard workers could be from biblical times, or from the current picking season in the garden of Kent. Along with Paul Nash’s Apple Pickers (1914) and Spencer’s The Apple Gatherers (1912), there’s a feel, perhaps gained with the added benefit of historical hindsight, of an immediately pre-lapsarian Eden, a place of easeful bounty which will soon be lost. Creation of Eve (1915) is a primal take on the Genesis tale, full of primitive violence. Eden here is a garden forested with oversized blue flowers. An earthily coloured Adam lies curled on the ground as if he were a part of it, a fertile seed bed. God pulls Eve from his side by her hair as if he were uprooting a fullgrown vegetable. Eve is a pale figure, separate from the brown-skinned God and Adam, who are joined together at arm and knee to form an undivided whole. Eve is torn between the human and divine, stretched thin and taut, aggressively held in a state of tension which looks akin to an assault. She is the female image as objectified by the male viewpoint, split between idealised purity and desired but reviled sexuality. It’s a powerful and at the time controversial composition which could be seen as being as much about the representation of the female in art as much as in religion (the two convergent for many centuries, of course). Consciously or otherwise, it also perhaps expresses Gertler’s own ambiguous feelings towards women, and his agonies over his love for Carrington, which left his desires eternally suspended.

Paul Nash - The Wood on the Hill (1912)

Nash’s early pen and ink works are clearly in the lineage of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. The Combat: Angel and Devil places giant figures astride a pastoral Palmeresque landscape, shining against the starry blackness. A hawk-headed birdman descends towards a sword-wielding angel until they are almost conjoined. It seems like a union of the spirits of heaven and earth as much as an archetypal conflict. The Cliff to the North is a mysterious moonlit scene with shooting star drawn from walks along the Norfolk coast. A simple shadowed outline of a figure rising at an approaching or receding angle from the bottom right of the frame is suggestive or more giants in the landscape, part of the jaggedly eroded geology of the sheared-off cliffs. The Wood on the Hill (1912) is one of Nash’s early depictions of the Wittenham Clumps, the twin beech-topped mounds which were to become the ultimate loci of his search for the numinous spirit of place. The stubbled and harvest stacked fields place the scene in a specific seasonal moment, whilst the rising swirl of black, pen-strophed crows implies an accompanying chorus of cawing complaint, perhaps set off by some intrusive presence among the trees. They are joined on this occasion by a dead fly, trapped behind the glass of the frame. It seems to have gained immortality on the postcard reproduction, too.

Mark Gertler - Gilbert Cannan and his Mill (1916)

Nash had found his first spiritual home at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire, to which his family moved from Kensington. He was drawn to nature and the mystery of the English landscape from an early age, and was much more at ease away from the city. The urge to retreat to a personal rural paradise was also strongly felt by Gertler and Carrington (Spencer grew up in his blissful idyll and never truly left it). Gertler spent many weekends at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s manor house in Garsington near Oxford, which she had opened up to artists of all stripes. Pool at Garsington summons up the picturesque atmosphere of the place, its empty and still canvas a theatrical backdrop against which cultured debate, self-consciously extravagant gestures and personal intrigues could be staged. He also spent a good deal of time at Mill House at Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire, a converted windmill and its adjacent buildings in which his friend Gilbert Cannan, an aspiring writer, lived. It was here that he worked on his depiction of natural bounty The Fruit Sorters (1914). The simple, childlike forms of his portrait Gilbert Cannan and his Mill from 1916 (his wife seems to have disappeared from the equation), with its soppy, friendly dogs protectively enveloping his spindly but brightly alert figure evokes a true feeling of home, a safe retreat from the harshness of the world beyond. This is reinforced by the firmly rooted solidity of the tree beside the windmill, with its sheltering umbrella of foliage. As with so many characters in this story, Cannan’s life was not a contented one, however. His literary ambitions were realised by filleting Gertler’s confidences and casting him, along with Carrington and Nevinson, as the barely disguised protagonists of his novel Mendel. When it was published towards the end of 1916, Gertler naturally saw it as a massive betrayal of trust, and the friendship was effectively at an end. Cannan, affected by the ongoing slaughter on the continent, the failure of his marriage and the death of his beloved dogs (and perhaps also by his conscience) suffered a massive mental breakdown. He struggled for a long time to regain the urge to write or communicate in any meaningful way.

Gertler’s painting Near Swanage moves towards Nash territory, both stylistically and geographically. Nash and his wife Margaret periodically lived in an old farmhouse overlooking Swanage Bay from 1934-6, and he produced many paintings inspired by the area, including one of his best known, Landscape from a Dream, now owned by the Tate. Nash also used his familiarity with the Dorset coast and countryside to compile the Shell Guide to the county in 1935. Gertler’s landscape has the mysterious quality of Nash’s work, the sea and headlands glimpsed through borders of obscuring woodland which are both solid and oddly blurred and spectral. The painting has the quietly haunted stillness of a dream, its emptiness suggestive of some significant event which we are waiting for, a lurking presence which will soon make its entrance.

Carrington also found her blessed home counties idyll, a pocket paradise sheltered from the chaos of the twentieth century at Mill House in Tidmarsh, which she shared with Lytton Strachey. She’d met Strachey in 1915 at another such retreat, Asheham House in Sussex, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s weekend cottage. Later, in 1924, she’d move with Strachey to a larger house near Hungerford in the Berkshire countryside. Her painting of The River Pang Above Tidmarsh (1918), lightly shaded by the trees lining the bank, evokes the spirit of summery tranquillity which she found here. It was a tranquillity which allowed her some respite from the personal devastation of war. Of her three brothers, all of whom had gone to the Western Front, one had died in the Somme, one suffered from shell shock, and one was badly wounded.

David Bomberg - Study for Sappers at Work (1918-9)

The war had an enormous impact on all the artists in the exhibition, whether they experienced it at first hand or not. Gertler was a conscientious objecter, and even when he was finally called up for the draft in the latter stages, he was declared unfit for service. The war served to further underline his feelings of isolation, the sense of being an outsider in the ‘cultured’ world he now inhabited, which was so far removed from his poverty stricken background and Jewish upbringing. Spencer and Bomberg both enlisted and went to the front, the former with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the latter as a sapper (a combat engineer, which in this case would have involved building and maintaining trenches) with the King’s Royal Rifles. Spencer managed to stumble through in a daze, as much the innocent fool, conspicuously apart from his comrades, as he had been at the Slade. This innocence seemed almost to act as some sort of protection, sparing him while more experienced men of the world fell to either side. Bomberg eventually took a more direct and practical escape route from the horrors he faced; he shot himself in the foot in 1918. Neither of them would produce significant work reflecting their experiences in the trenches until after the war, when official commissions would result in large scale memorials. Bomberg’s Sappers At Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hll 60, St Eloi was painted at the best of the government Canadian War Memorials Fund. The first version, a large study of which dominates one wall of the final gallery, proved controversial. The forms of the sappers are semi-abstracted, reduced to lines of limbs and bent torsos. They seem on the verge of fusing with the geometries of the framework of props they’re constructing and the tools they’re using for the job. The colours are bright and non-naturalistic throughout, so there’s little tonal distinction between the human and the inanimate. Such an avant-garde transformation of what was supposed to be a celebration of heroic war work into an abstract pattern of motion, structure and colour was not exactly what the Canadian government had in mind, and Bomberg was obliged to produce something a little less radical, even though this was far less extreme than his earlier work.

It was Nevinson and Nash who produced the most significant work of the wartime period. Nevinson joined the Friends Ambulance Unit towards the start of the war, and was posted to the ‘Shambles’, a railway shed in Dunkirk which had been turned into a makeshift hospital in which the wounded and dying were dumped. Here, and in his ambulance trips to the front, Nevinson witnessed the terrible results of mechanised warfare. All the bombastic Futurist rhetoric thrilling to the noise and spectacle of modern warfare was exposed as grotesque and hollow in the face of its reality. Old habits died hard, however, and Nevinson couldn’t help indulging in a little more of it himself when he first came home. But he used the Futurist and Vorticist styles in a way which directly refuted such bluster. He gave it what it had never had before – a moral dimension. In the ironically titled La Patrie, his depiction of the dark interior of the hospital shed, he paints the recumbent rows of bodies with sharp angles and uncomfortably jutting elbows and knees. The faces are reduced to masks of open-mouthed pain. The dehumanisation of the Futurist figure here acts as a metaphor fro the way in which war and its concomitant agonies of pain and death reduces men to a deindividuated mass. This can also be seen in the row of stick-like figures, seemingly connected to one another to form a clumsy composite being, trudging along a bleak, featureless path to the front in the black chalk silhouettes of Return to the Trenches (1914).

Nash joined up near the start of the war in the Artists Rifles (he was the only artist in the regiment), but was initially posted on the home front. He was sent over to France with the Hampshire Regiment in 1917, but injured himself in a fall just before he was due to go over the top as part of the second battle of Ypres. He was back there in the winter of 1917 for the third battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele, this time as an Official War Artist, part of a scheme which had been set up by the government in June 1916. What he witnessed at Passchendaele prompted a now famous letter back home to his wife Margaret in which his anger and disgust was couched in almost biblically prophetic and revolutionary terms: ‘I am no longer an artist interested and curious’ he wrote to her. ‘I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls’. Nash depicted the devastation of the war through its effect on the landscape. The bleak new vistas created by massive bombardment and entrenchment laid out onto the hellish, barren world created and maintained between 1914-18. Nash’s blasted landscapes rarely have any human figures in them. If they are present, they are tiny and insignificant outlines in the middle or far distance, hunched up against rain or falling shells. These are lifeless environments in which they are a fleeting, fugitive presence. Chaos Decoratif, a pen, ink and watercolour work from 1917, is like a prelude to the full-blown apocalypse. The woodland it depicts is still intact, green and alive, with only the splintered trunks of a couple of trees and the beginnings of a trench to suggest the proximity of destructive forces. The outline drawing Graves in a Ruined Orchard updates the pastoral and the gothic traditions to bitterly ironic effect. The ruined building is presumably a farmhouse, but might as well be the remains of an old church or abbey. The graves in front of it are new, bodies planted where the apple trees have been uprooted. This is a newly fashioned facsimile of the gothic, the pastoral despoiled. It could almost be seen as a dark wartime sequel to Nash’s pre-war painting The Apple Pickers. The Pill Box depicts the new wartime vernacular architecture, blocklike concrete forms planted incongruously in the landscape. They are the antithesis of natural form, and anticipate Nash’s introduction of surrealist elements into his landscapes in the 30s, as well as his fascination with megaliths.

Paul Nash - The Void (1918)

The Void (1918) is one of the major paintings in which Nash reveals the landscape of war in all its churned and blasted devastation, a morass of poisoned mud upon which human attempts to impose some kind of order seem pathetically provisional. Nash draws on some elements of Futurism and Vorticism to depict the zig-zagging boardwalk along which jagged stick figures trudge, and the angular shafts of rain, shell trails and explosive trajectories. Splintered tree stumps loosely rooted in the quagmire are a reminder of a landscape now erased. It is a ghost landscape from which all colour has been drained save for grey, mud browns, a mouldy khaki and the steely blue of the stormy skies. The only hints of brighter colour come in the form of bloodstains on the frosty ground and the patchwork of the camouflage cover on the van, which crashes out of the left hand side of the frame. This draws attention to it rather than disguising it, which may be why it is lying wrecked and useless. The whole scene is like some great dumping ground, with shells and shell-boxes, rifles, wire and broken lengths of duckboard scattered indiscriminately around. In the foreground, a ragged uniform lies splayed out on the ground like a collapsed scarecrow, its human frame gnawed and rotted away to leave this pitiful outline. The wheels of artillery guns provide the sole circular element to the composition. The guns themselves are half-embedded in the mud, making them resemble some new and malignant fungal growth. In the background, a tank crawls along like a steady and sturdy beetle. The outline of a plane against the white clouds of smoke resembles a double-winged dragonfly, a mechanical parody of life. It is seen here as a small element amongst (and contributing to) the general scene of ongoing destruction. As such, it differs from one of Nevinson’s 1917 paintings as an Official War Artist, Spiral Descent. This is a heroic picture of a divebombing biplane suspended in the endless blue, a celebration of aerial derring-do which partially reverts to the old Futurist tendency towards glorying in war and its machineries. Of course, the spiral descent may well be one which is beyond the pilot’s control, a death plunge rather than a daring swoop into a strafing run. The descent of Nash’s plane is silhouetted against a screen of dense smoke. Just above it is the upper arc of what appears to be a large moon. The world of the elements, of monthly and seasonal cycles abides, even if it is currently veiled or buried. Nash hints at its return once the orgy of destruction finally reaches the point of terminal exhaustion.

The war proved a harsh apotheosis for some of the artists in the exhibition, prompting a new intensity of expression which it was subsequently hard to recapture after its end. Nevinson travelled to America, to the Futurists’ dream city of New York, but his aggressively self-aggrandising rhetoric failed to win him any friends or converts there. Temples of New York (1919) shows how naturally the skyscraping cityscape conformed to his artistic vision. Here he could draw or paint pictures which were both Futurist or Vorticist in form, but also simple naturalistic representations of what he saw. The last of his paintings on display here, Studio in Montparnasse (1926), retreats from any trace of modernism, both in terms of style and subject matter. It shows a naked model at rest in front of a large studio window in a luxuriously appointed Parisian garret, and might as well have been painted in the mid to late 19th century. There’s a slight Vorticist element to the angular blocks of the rooftops beyond, but the heavy on either side of the window suggest that this is a scene upon which the curtain could fall at any moment, leaving us with the warmly coloured details of the interior and shutting out the past which to which the exterior alludes for once and all. What renown the painting has seems to lie as much in the fact that it was once owned by H.G.Wells, a plaque on the frame declaring that he donated it in 1927. Nevinson would continue in this conservative mode, even producing landscapes which owed something to the spirit of Paul Nash (as in Silver Estuary from 1925/7, which can be found in Leeds Art Gallery). By the time he died in 1946, 4 years after a debilitating stroke, he had become a somewhat isolated and bitter figure, raging against the state of the world. His work had long since fallen into obscurity. He is now remembered almost exclusively for his powerful wartime paintings, which gained such renown when they were first shown in one man shows at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1916 and 1918.

Bomberg also drew back from his high modernist style in the post-war period, partly due to a lack of recognition in what he saw as a provincial British art world. He lived for a time in Palestine and painted the arid, semi-desert landscapes in the region. He become involved in Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish homeland there, and his propagandistic work towards furthering that end necessitated a simplification of style in order to communicate more directly. Even if he retreated from experimentalism himself, and his work fell into obscurity, he became a dedicated and committed teacher of a new generation of painters when he returned to England. Amongst his pupils at Borough Polytechnic in London in the 40s and 50s were Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff who, as members of the so-called Euston Road school forged a new kind of semi-abstract art.

Nash’s painting The Sea Wall (1919) dates from the time he spent in Dymchurch after the war, essentially recovering from nervous collapse. It’s another depopulated landscape, half transformed by human agency. The fixed concrete geometries set against the flux of the cold, wintry sea have something of a mausoleum air about them. These are like the solidified and inverted forms of the trench spaces, as if Rachel Whiteread had gone back in time to create a monumental memorial. Nash would continue to seek out the spirit of place across the Southern counties, that uncanny quality hanging over certain sites. He would create a kind of English landscape surrealism which perfectly captured it. He was appointed an official war artist in the second world war as he had been in the first, and created memorable images of predatory bombers, tangled contrails and seas filled with the husks of dead German fighter planes (the well-known Totes Meer or Dead Sea). His ill-health caught up with him shortly after the war ended, a long standing asthmatic complaint leading to a final deterioration. His respiratory problems may have had their origins in, or at least been exacerbated by his time in the trenches. Gas, both chlorine and mustard, was first used in Ypres at the time that he was there. Shortly before his death, and in anticipation of it, he painted a series of views of the Wittenham Clumps, which he invested with his and his wife Margaret’s own cyclical solar and lunar symbolism. With these late paintings, he inscribed something of his own most inward and intimate being into the spirit of this place which had meant so much to him.

Spencer incorporated his war experiences into his visionary worldview with the murals he painted for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire some years after the conflict had ended (they were created over a five year period between 1927 and 1932). He had also been appointed as an Official War Artist, one result of which was Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919). Here, as in the Sandham paintings, he tried to depict the compassionate side of human nature, the healing of human bodies rather than their destruction. The Sandham murals rather than the official work were his most heartfelt expression of this attempt to find humanity in the barbarous heart of war, and they were humbly hidden away from the general view of all but locals and dedicated pilgrims (religious or art-loving or both). He tried to remain true to his early Cookham visions throughout his life, striving to sustain the spirit in which they’d first come to him with such preternatural clarity. Even when a disastrous romantic liaison forced him to take up unwanted commissions and travel further afield to avoid financial ruin, he still kept coming back. He seemed to retain his owlish innocence in the face of all that life might throw at him, or all that that innocence and wilfully childlike credulity left him open to.

Carrington never fulfilled her artistic promise, having always been crippled by self-doubt. She did find fulfilment in the applied arts, however, rather like Vanessa Bell did during this period. She worked for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, decorated the homes she shared with Strachey, and painted signs for shops and pubs near her rural retreats. Gertler never quite gave up on her, although the brief consummation of their relationship, which he had dreamed of for so long, probably also marked the beginning of its end. After embarking on a completely fresh start, seeking out new directions after the war, his artistic confidence declined, and he struggled to regain the certainties and exploratory energy of his youth. Finally, depressed at the lukewarm reaction to his latest exhibition and by the news of the persecution of the Jews on the continent, he committed suiced on 23rd June 1939.

These six lives, tormented and frequently unhappy though they were, left a rich legacy which perfectly illustrates the different directions art was taking in England in the early years of the century, and the ways in which British artists responded to developments on the continent to produce something distinctively their own. Spencer’s reputation has remained firmly established over the years, as has Nash’s to a lesser extent. Their neo-romantic vision has been seen as a peculiarly British blend of modern and traditional values, and therefore acceptable in a country generally hostile to modernism and artistic experiment. Nevinson, Gertler, Carrington and Bomberg have all suffered from neglect, however, falling into obscurity during their lives and after their deaths. Carrington’s name still carries a certain amount of celebrity heft (enough to warrant a singularly titled movie biopic), but this is more to do with her Bloomsbury connections than her artistic achievements. Their attempts to create a modern British art for the new century have generally been judged as a pale shadow of the continental art of the time, part of a general assumption of inferiority and cultural provincialism. They are now being rediscovered and reassessed, however, finding an enthusiastically appreciative new audience (as the crowded Dulwich galleries attested). David Boyd Haycock’s book and this accompanying exhibition have done much to bring their considerable achievements back into the limelight.

British Art Up North: Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Birmingham

PART TWO – The Twentieth Century

Walter Sickert - O Nuit D’Amour

Walter Sickert’s O Nuit D’Amour in Manchester shares the unconventional perspective of Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room In Paris (see Part One), one drained of drama. The warm chandelier glow of a restaurant, in which a violinist serenades the diners, is seen through four window panes (frames within the frame) set in the dim, mossy green wall panels (a green which is characteristic of Sickert) and the deeper darkness of the night beyond which takes up most of the composition. The figures inside are blurred and indistinct, and the implied sound of the violin and the buzz of convivial chatter muted by the windows. This heightens the sense of being shut out, of being a remote voyeur of someone else’s romantic evening. The Blackbird of Paradise (1896-8) in Leeds is a portrait of a smiling woman dressed in black, with a black-feathered headdress capping her dark plumage. Her face is painted with thick curving strokes, building up layers of pale foundation and rosy rouge. The scarlet lips and earring contrast with her black outfit. She is presumably one of the performers from the music halls which Sickert frequented in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the Old Bedford being a favourite. This portait differs from his usual compositions which drew on these environs. They tended to incorporate stage surroundings and the seats, stalls and boxes of the theatre itself, along with their occupants. The Miner (1936) in Birmingham is a picture of down to earth romanticism, with the returning miner, face still blackened, embracing his wife at the door, drawing her into a coal-dusted kiss. There is a sense of immediate and passionate need, which can’t wait until he crosses the threshold. Perhaps there has been an accident, and she had feared him dead. The flagon under his arm suggests that there is something to celebrate. The underlying narrative is left ambiguous, allowing us to provide our own details.

Wood in Richmond Park - Spencer Gore

Two artists influenced by Sickert, Spencer Gore and Robert Bevan, have paintings here which move beyond the observational urban scenes which typified the work of the Camden Town and London groups to which they were attached. Bevan made regular trips down to Somerset, staying at a farm in the Blackdown Hills, near the Devon border. Here, he painted rural scenes, often with farmhouses and animals included. In their subtle transformations of the landscape into clearly outlined, angular forms, they adapted the post-impressionism of Cezanne and Gauguin into a particularly English idiom, as can be seen in Dunn’s Cottage (1915) in Leeds. Gore’s Wood in Richmond Park (1913-14), in Birmingham, used the same subdued palette of ochres, olive greens and mustard yellows for its receding ranks of tree boles as he used for his town and city scenes of Letchworth and London. Sadly, it would be one of the last paintings he finished; he caught pneumonia after getting soaked during an outdoor painting session and died on 25th March 1914.

There are a number of works by artists associated with the Slade School of Art in the early part of the century, all of whom were searching for some new means of expression, a break from the traditions of the Victorian age (a search vividly described in David Boyd Haycock's book A Crisis of Brilliance). They wished to evade the orthodoxies of the Royal Academy, but were also suspicious of the official alternatives promoted in Bloomsbury circles by the critic Roger Fry. Fry had organised an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910 called Monet and the Post-Impressionists which introduced the colourful and formally inventive paintings of Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh and, above all, Cezanne to the London art world. Such vivid works, soaked in the light of the Mediterraenean, proved a particular inspiration to artists such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, both of whom were firmly ensconced in the Bloomsbury clique. But to others, they were something to react against, not least because of Fry’s patronage. He was a man who had a strong, opinion-forming influence on the artistic direction of the day, his ideas coming to carry the weight of received wisdom. They were codified in fellow Bloomsbury acolyte Clive Bell’s 1914 book whose declamatory title, Art, seemed to indicate the drawing up of a definitive statement on the state of things, the setting down of a newly established aesthetic. To a new, rebellious and idealistically ambitious generation, Fry was a controlling father figure whose influence they sought to break away from. Richard Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts all tried to find their own visual style, to depict their own particular experiences of the changing world, their own way of seeing and sense of place, drawing on the example of Cezanne to some extent, and on other more turbulent currents of modernism cutting a swathe across the continent. Stanley Spencer was also at the Slade in the pre-war period, but, as with Francis Bacon, I confess to having a blind spot where his paintings are concerned, and will leave them to the many others who better appreciate his work.

The Vorticists pursued a more radically modern direction than the post-impressionism adapted to English climates by the Camden Town and London groups. They drew on the angular forms and noisy, aggressively self-promoting rhetoric of the Italian Futurists. The latter aspect was a speciality of Wyndham Lewis, never a man to worry unduly about making or keeping friends. Richard Nevinson was a particular Futurist acolyte for a while, and collaborated with the leading (and invariably loud) voice of the movement, Filippo Marinetti, whose spell he had fallen under when he had visited London for an exhibition and accompanying performances in 1912. The English version of the Futurist Manifesto, published in 1914, volubly set itself against almost everything which had gone before and which came to mind. It was swiftly superceded by Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist manifesto, set out in his magazine Blast, which immediately caught the eye with the striking explosive graphic design of its cover. This also set about loudly decrying everything else which had preceded it or which was going on at the time as being a load of old rubbish. Both were inherently macho movements, glorying in manifestos-at-dawn scrapping (whether verbal or physical – the one frequently spilling over into the other). The noise and artillery blast of war was the ultimate expression of its valorisation of the iron poetry, power station noises and harsh factory rhythms of the machine age. First hand experience of the conflict soon put paid to such hollow, strutting rhetoric, however. Nevinson worked with his foreign correspondent father in a Quaker ambulance unit in the first year of the war, tending to French soldiers in a railway shed in Dunkirk, temporarily converted into a hospital ominously known as the Shambles. His painting La Patrie reflects this experience, and put paid to any of the notions of the war as an endeavour of patriotic heroism, the ideals of clean and noble sacrifice promulgated by the relentless propoganda.

La Patrie - Richard Nevinson

Richard Nevinson’s La Patrie (1916) in Birmingham depicts a dark shed filled with bodies, limbs straight lines set at sharply steepled angles. A new admission is being carried in on a stretcher, his legs forming a pyramid which is highlighted by the narrow rectangle of light greyly penetrating the gloom. Features are shadowed, eyeless scars and open-mouthed gashes, set in granitic, sculpted grimaces of pain or vacant gapes of numbed finality. Bandages provide some of the few curved lines in the composition, blood staining their grubby whiteness offering the only hint of primary colour. The clenched fist of the man in the foreground, who stares upward into the darkness, is a spiral of light olive against the surrounding blackness, and forms a focal point (the regard of the man lying on his front to the left also draws our attention to it), embodying the agonies of the bodies massed all around, and of the war at large. This isn’t a field hospital, it’s a morgue, both for those already dead and those who have been left to die. The resemblance to a cattle shed is appropriate. Sadly, Nevinson was to revert to Futurist type shortly after returning home, and was soon bragging about his war experiences, turning them into self-aggrandising tales of personal endurance and daring escapades. La Patrie remains as a powerful depiction of the charnel house reality of the conflict, however. In Silver Estuary (1925) in Leeds, Nevinson offers a pacific version of the blasted landscapes of the Western Front (as depicted by Paul Nash), the serpentine curves of the light-hazed water draw the eye towards the horizon, broken by the upright or gently leaning straight lines of the marker posts. It’s a picture full of light, the direct opposite of La Patrie.

Praxitella - Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis’ Praxitella (1921) in Leeds is a full length seated portrait (positioned on appropriately modernist furniture) of Iris Barry, with the Greek sculptor Praxiteles given a female name. The body spreads out in a series of voluminous folds and pleats exaggerated into vorticist planes, until they look like segmented plates of armour. The dark green lends a mossy aura, like age old growth covering tumbles of rocks in the dank heart of the woods. The striped bands circling the lower skirt and the piping around the hems are a fungal brown which adds to the feel of something which thrives in the shade, away from the sun. This brown is also echoed in the mushroom-like stem which props up the chair arm. The face is verdigrised, like tarnished and weathered copper. It seems shrivelled in comparison to the rest of the body, planted awkwardly on a rolled tube of a neck, the swivelling division marked by another line of fungal brown. Its surface is broken up in the cubist manner, but the blocked-off, clearly outlined facets remain coherent, giving the appearance of sheet metal hammered into an angular mask approximating human features. Red lips pout beneath a sharp cylindrical nose and the beams of yellow eyes peering with cold calculation from beneath half-shuttered lids. Their sensuality is disturbing in its utter disconnection from the rest of the face. The hands, resting in the lap, look gauntlets from a suit of armout, or the chrome, segmented claws of a robot, a term which had been invented a year earlier by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Any resemblance to the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis would be entirely appropriate given that Barry would go on to become the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s probably fair to say that this isn’t a terribly flattering portrait from the point of view of the sitter, although Barry was a friend of Lewis’. It is a fascinating modern depiction of the human form re-fashioned for the machine age, however.

Pond at Garsington - Mark Gertler

Mark Gertler’s Pond at Garsington (1916) in Leeds provides a contrast between the curved organic forms of the trees and the rectilinear shape of the pond. It’s tilted upward like a mirror, reflecting the world at a slightly off-kilter angle. The bowed bough of a tree on the right hand side is mirrored in the pool, forming a zig-zag border to that side of the frame. The tree in the foreground has a solid, almost bodily presence, with a cockatoo crown and two foliate arms raised in supplication or rude gesticulation. Mark Gertler’s ambiguous relationship with Garsington and the artistic gatherings which Lady Ottoline Morell hosted there is perhaps reflected in the picture. The stillness and lack of human presence in this scene is at odds with the garrulous goings on associated with the place. Gertler was frequently the life and soul of the party, but also suffered from periods of depression and self-doubt. At times he expressed a certain amount of disdain for the social circles in which he moved, at Garsington and elsewhere, whilst generally taking advantage of the opportunities they offered him. This painting suggests a desire for a solitary centre into which he could retreat.

Jazz Party - William Roberts

William Roberts’ The Jazz Party (1923) in Leeds emphasises the solidity of bodies packed into a room in which a party is in full swing, immobile heads reduced to shrunken appendages. Their faces are like African masks, drawing on the same influences which had inspired Picasso and the Cubists. The bodies are jammed together in conglomerations of angles and curves, elbows and asses. Only the figure in the centre breaks free of the dancing mass, his shrugging shoulders and upraised hands suggesting a rapturous response to some soaring trumpet phrase. The cone of the phonograph speaker is pointed directly at the dancing mass, the implied blast of sound seemingly sweeping them into one half of the frame as if it were directing a galeforce gust of wind. The dancers look strangely stiff and joyless, coin slot mouths set in rigidly inexpressive gawps, the masks conjuring a ritualistic air. This is furthered by the group on the right hand side. The pompadoured figure in the upper right grasps his forehead and wails in a seeming agony of emotion. A comforting arm encircles him, its hand placed on his upper arm. Beneath the arching angle of his armpit, another man supports a woman who seems to have fainted, her closed eyes and open mouth suggesting unconsciousness or death. The ecstasy of jazz has produced its own mini-pieta, with the indifferent figures sitting at the table below, dealing cards and playing the records, like Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross.

Double Self-Portrait - David Bomberg

David Bomberg’s Bab-es Siq, Petra (1924) in Birmingham depicts the entrance to the ancient Arabian city carved from the desert mountains. The rocks here are painted in very fleshy tones, the shadowed cleft between the two outcrops, leading into the ancient ruins, taking on a sensual quality. The shadows are illuminated by a single small square of white, as if we are being guided towards this sacred space. Bomberg’s Double Self-Portrait (1937) in Wakefield is a portrait of the artist as a happy and contented man, with beret and stem pipe providing the traditional accoutrements. His face is flushed with a warm pastel glow and his head haloed by a billowing pink cloud. Stripes of purple paint are draped over his shoulder, as if he was wrapped in imperial splendour. Bomberg seems to be feeling good about himself here, perhaps deliberately repudiating the by now clichéd depiction of the artist as tormented bohemian outsider, wracked by the quest for a new vision and totally misunderstood by society at large.

The selection of inter-war works in the left of the two twentieth century galleries in Leeds seems to cluster around the focal point of the Unit One group which Paul Nash established in 1933, and the branching streams which it attempted to channel can also be found in the other museums under scrutiny here. Unit One, a utilitarian name if ever there was one, was intended to bring artists together in order to further the cause of the promotion and development of certain tendencies in modern art. Its membership consisted of Nash himself, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, John Armstrong, John Bigge, Edward Burra, Frances Hodgkins, Edward Wadsworth, and the architects Wells Coates (responsible for the Isokon Flats in Hampstead where Hepworth lived for a while, and the external stairway of which I’m standing in front of in my profile picture) and Colin Lucas. Hodgkins swiftly resigned, his place taken by Tristram Hillier. As tends to be the case with artists, however, ideological conflicts and creative differences soon manifested themselves, and the group didn’t last more than a year. It only managed to stage one exhibition, which was held at the Mayer Gallery in April 1933. Part of the reason was the tension caused by contrary attractions of the twin poles of abstraction and surrealism, which the various members were moving towards, and which many regarded as being mutually exclusive and immiscible.

Still Life (Dolomites) - Ben Nicholson

Nicholson led the branch which favoured an abstraction informed by sculptural and architectural considerations. The admission of architects into the group was a recognition of their importance in forming a recognisable and coherent modernist style which could be combined with and incorporate modernist artforms. Nicholson, Hepworth and others were also influenced by the Russian Constructivists, artists and architects who were by this time written out of the cultural history of their own country since Lenin and then Stalin’s declaration of the supremacy of social realism as the only necessary art of the state. English Constructivism would reach its austere apotheosis in Nicholson’s reliefs, one of which, Construction (1945), was on display in Manchester. Built up from layers of board (a cheap and disposable material) placed on top of each other, painted white or left in their original brown shades, and with perfect circles cut out off centre, these seemed designed to take their place on the clean white interiors of modernist houses or flats; perhaps even one of the apartments in the Isokon. The shifting sunlight would move shadows around the declivity of the recessed circle, giving it a subtly morphing aspect as the day progressed. Still Life (Dolomites) (1950) in Birmingham folds in thinly drawn outlines, including recognisable objects such as a goblet and the stupa-like lid of a teapot or samovar. Small areas of colour create a sense of depth and layered three dimensionality (a certain trompe-l’oeil effect), as well as providing bright bursts of contrast to the prevailing creams and cardboard browns. It has the feel of a die-cut pop-up waiting to be folded out, the frame laid out to become the base.

Figure for Landscape - Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth has attained a degree of widespread recognition and a reputation sustained over a long enough period such that she has now earned a whole artistic space named after her (the Hepworth Wakefield), housing her sculptures in a purpose built gallery in Wakefield, the town in which she was born. Its spacious and light filled upper floor contains works spanning her considerable range, from small, intimate marble groupings, smooth mini-megaliths, through hollowed out, boulder like forms in wood and stone, lines of space and tension marked out with tightly strung threads of string or nylon in the Constructivist, Naum Gaboesque manner, to the models for large scale public structures. These include the metallic framework of Construction (Crucifixion) from 1966 which, with its varying breadths of line, solid and outlined lengths, and red and white blocks of colour acts as an homage to Mondrian, with the addition of a yellow sun disc breaking with his strict adherence to linearity, adding an individual, female circularity; the Winged Figure from 1963, which still perches on the inverted L of its pedestal on the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street, poised to launch into a swooping flight over the sluggish traffic and thronging shoppers; and the Figure (Archaean) from 1959, which leans over with an inquisitive stoop, the oval space beneath its flattened off top acting as a lens to frame whatever lies beyond, inviting focussed observation. The Hepworth collection centres around a number of the maquettes, or sculptural models, which she prepared as guides for bronze casts. One of the most effective of these is Figure for Landscape from 1959-60, which is placed in a window looking out towards the busy ring road rushing by on the other side of the river. In this bleached bone plastercast version, it looks even more like a spectral figure, sheets billowing out around a vaguely human form, a slack, groaning gap where the face should be, the interior a shadowy, gutted hollow. It must have startled a fair few travellers after dark, illuminated momentarily in the headlights of passing vehicles. You can come across one of its verdigrised bronze casts drifting amongst the trees in the grounds of Exeter University, which it has haunted since 1965.

Superimposed Forms - Jessica Dismorr

Jessica Dismorr’s Superimposed Forms (1938) in Birmingham has the simplified abstraction of Nicholson, with a limited, subdued palette and cut out forms resembling the sculptural shapes of Hepworth. The pale creams and browns have the quality of polished marble or rock. The shapes are layered on top of one another, giving them a diaphanous, translucent quality, as if they were floating in some liquid suspension. The straight edges and angles and the sensuous curves rhyme, contrast and interconnect with one another. There’s a hint of figurative elements, of the human form, and the two greyish brown shapes at the back (or is it the front) are like doorways or Romanesque archways upended and laid on one side.

Yellow Balance - John Tunnard

John Tunnard’s Yellow Balance (1937) in Leeds looks like the plans for a mobile sculpture. A long red pin is fixed into a sloping ground, and a taut skein of black and white threads are attached to and join together two forms: a grey, boatlike shape with jutting prow and rising hull, and the yellow wind-filled spread of sail, marked with a plectrum-shaped brown thumb smudge. The grey hull rests on a black, pointed fulcrum, and a wayward swaying and bucking motion is implied, riding the swells of some invisible ocean of the air. An thick black line arcing across the canvas is suggestive of a horizon, with a black spire peering over its brim. It scores through the yellow and grey boat forms, making them seem translucent and evanescent, assemblages of Perspex and cellophane.

Abstract Composition (With String) - Francis Butterfield

Francis Butterfield’s Abstract Composition (with string) (1936) in Leeds has a palette of cubist restraint, its coppery browns and dirty creams along with its textured surface giving it a woody appearance. The straight, plank-like blocks are contrasted with the wandering line of the ‘string’. Some of its amoeboid lobes are shaded in, giving an impression of raised or recessed depth. Circles further offset the straight lines, the lower one also adding a striking element of primary colour. It looks like the mark left by a coffee mug, although this would have to be a particularly bloody cup of java (borscht-filled instead, maybe). A wobbly oval form hovers towards the to of the frame, tilting perilously close to the sharp right angle just below, a proximity which adds an element of tension to the composition (which otherwise is lent a relaxed, easy feel by the slack loops of the string).

The Shore - Paul Nash

Paul Nash was less doctrinaire than some of his Unit One colleagues, and felt the attraction of both abstraction, a kind of post-Voricist geometric ordering of the world into rationalised form, and a surrealist sensibility which introduced the incongruous and the extraordinary into the daylit world. Ultimately, however, his art was always rooted in a sense of place, an intuiting of the spirit which suffused certain special, magical locales. Dymchurch, on the South Kent coast, where he went to live after being discharged from the army, and where he recovered from physical and mental debilitation, provided an environment of prefabricated geometrical rigour, a straight-lined concrete boundary to hold back the surging curve of the sea. This was ideal surrealist territory, as well, with the shore meeting the constructed human world; the edges of the unconscious depths of dream meeting the rational world of conscious sensibility. The flat plane of the beach, an interzone between the two states, features in a lot of British surrealism, appropriately enough for an island nation. In Nash’s 1923 painting The Shore, in Leeds, the edge of the sea is demarcated by a curving line, which we understand to be shifting and unstable. Its colours and reflective surface are contiguous with the sky, and it has more in common with that realm than with the land. The boundary of the human world is marked by rigid and heavily outlined straight lines, which stretch out in angular, wedge-like stretches to the horizon, where a sharp perspective point joins with the curve of the sea. The expanse of sand is divided by parallel black lines, groins with small upright poles which are eventually eradicated by the obscurity of distance. No human form breaks the conjunction of the natural and the constructed, the line and the curve. Other Dymchurch paintings do introduce spectral figures, which glide along the concrete seawalls like apparitions in some of MR James’ stories set on the East Anglian coastline.

Forest 37 (assemblage) in Leeds is formed of wooden glove stands split in two. A diversion into sculpture using found objects, it shows Nash’s allegiance to surrealism. The imagination sees strange forms in everyday items and the broken and discarded, making the ordinary strange (and vice-versa). The appropriated glove stands form the bare, optimal idea of a forest, a dream reduction to symbolic form. Placed with a box frame, they have the feel of a stage set, some strange, Svankmajer-like puppets liable to emerge at any moment. These splintered, blasted trees, resembling the gnarled, petrified forests glimpsed from the train in the Universal horror movie Son of Frankenstein, can’t help but remind us of the devastated First World War landscapes Nash drew and painted, culminating in his stark masterpiece We Are Making A New World.

Nocturnal Landscape - Paul Nash

Nocturnal Landscape (1938) in Manchester reflects Nash’s fascination with megalithic sites. Here, the stones take on semi-organic forms. The stone on the left is heart shaped, a fruit stone, perhaps, whilst that on the right appears to be sprouting a thick shoot. Behind them is another stone which looks like a pruned stem protruding from the earth, a cutting planted in the hope that it might take root. Ragged, flapping sheets of cloud blowing across the evening blue sky almost appear to be emerging from the sheared plane of its surface, angled towards the heavens. The ground they are all planted in or resting upon is barren, however, a parched yellow, either the dry, dead grass of late summer or the hot sands of a desert. The stones themselves look like wind-scoured bone. They cast cool blue pools of shadow, the colour matching that of the sky. On the lower plane to the upper right of the picture, shaded a darker estuarine brown, two standing stones stand sentinel either side of an upright ring, the assemblage resembling the megalithic site Men-an-tol in Cornwall. It has a ritualistic air about it, an atmosphere enhanced by the scrap of moon just above it, a recumbent foetal shape suggestive of incipient rebirth. To the right is another small pile of stones and what looks like the giant shells of dead turtles, something washed ashore from the moonbright sea on the horizon. A line in the sand suggests that it has been dragged here, towards the standing stones. On the upper, arid plane, a trellis on the left adds an incongruous surrealist element (as if the megalithic landscape weren’t in itself inherently surreal), the brown of its wooden struts making some connection with the brown of the ritual plane below. Its geometrical form is more intellectual construction erected to contrast with the primal massing below, is a modern manifestation from a world which puts its faith in the rational. The grid casts a distended moonshadow of itself, looking like the barred door of a prison cell. The shadows of the stones are a more ambiguous, seemingly divorced from the forms which cast them. Their oval and rounded shapes are suggestive of cave entrances into the subterraenean world.

Circle of Monoliths - Paul Nash

The Circle of Monoliths (1938), in Leeds removes the neutral strip of the shore, the interzone dividing land and sea, and has the ocean waves surge across megalithic fields. The two landscapes of dream border each other with no clearly defined boundary. The colours suggest a blurred inversion, the field a greyish oceanic blue and the sea the green of pasture land. The hedgerows continue through the waters in a wedge of narrowing perspective towards the horizon, as if marking out a safe road, a means of magically navigating both media. This pathway ends with a sloping shaft of light, which has the solidity of a thick suspension cable, or an escalator leading to the heavens, as in some posters for A Matter of Life and Death. To the right of the path, what appears to be an inverted tornado draws the water upward in a conical funnel rising from concentric ripples. It resembles an exaggerated earthworks, a melange of Badbury Rings, Old Sarum and a remoulded Silbury Hill. The megaliths in the foreground, emerging from a twilight field of pale china clay blue, are coloured with what looks like painted designs, emphasising contours, hollows and chiselled facets. The large stone in the centre foreground, shaped like a giant molar, is decorated with two circles shaded with red and yellow, black and white, which lends them a spherical aspect; planetary orbs, perhaps, or twinned sun and moon. The three smaller stones stand within red ovals of shadow, as if each had a protective moat of sacrificial blood, or as if they themselves were bleeding at the roots. This red colouration is echoed in the vine which coils around the hedgerow tree like an exposed network of veins. There are significant correspondences between the stones and elements of the landscape, which points to one being an expression of the other. The stone on the far right is analogous to the white cliffs on the upper left of the frame, looking as if it could have been extracted from one of its eroded cavities. The stone to its left partially mimics the form of the splintered tree trunk directly below. The stone on the left of the picture acts as a gnomon, casting a scalpel-edged blade of shadow which pierces the green heart of shadow beside the foregrounded stone – a pool of water, perhaps, if this greenness corresponds with that of the sea.

Landscape of the Moon’s First Quarter (1943) in Birmingham is one of a series of majestic works which Nash painted towards the end of his life, when chronic illness in the form of a chronic and ever-worsening asthma made him aware that he didn’t have much time left. He returned to the landscape around the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. He had first discovered the Clumps in 1911, and described the surroundings as ‘full of strange enchantment…a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten’. He depicted the twinned stands of beeches crowning chalk hill mounds from a number of perspectives, and with varying seasonal and meteorological atmospheres. He tried to express the spirit of this place which had affected him so deeply in his youth, and now did so again in his declining autumn, in all its myriad and mercurial aspects. In doing so, he made of it a landscape suffused with his own personal mythology. Through this intense connection with the Clumps and their surrounds, his sacralising of the local topography, he would leave some part of himself behind, the imprint of a concentrated act of sustained vision.

Landscape of the Moon's First Quarter - Paul Nash

In Landscape of the Moon’s First Quarter, the Clumps are a background detail, reduced to a hazy outline in the upper right of the frame. They are fused into one form here, the trees irregular, slate-grey bubbles, like timeworn boulders or rain-swollen clouds. Their fused form is reflected in a more individuated manner in the small stand of trees which lies directly below in the foreground of the picture. Pink-tinged evening clouds amass behind to form a mountainous range, the highest peak almost touching the lower cusp of the half moon, which looks as if it were a drifting puff of smoke belched out from a volcanic interior. In the foreground of the picture, a stretch of ground, bleached yellow by what we can assume to be the final rays of the setting sun, resembles an expanse of sandy beach. Two spheres of unequal size balance on another plane which forms a border on which the composition as a whole rests – a stone path or low wall in front of a country house, maybe (Nash was a frequent visitor at Boar’s Hill, a friend’s house near the Wittenham Clumps). These spheres, moss-fuzzed stone ornaments or immaculately sculpted shrubberies, are earthbound echoes of the moon hanging high above them near the upper border of the frame. They seem to be going through their own phases, with penumbral quadrants and curved terminator lines dividing light from dark. Sources of light are ambiguous, cast shadows suggesting the simultaneous effect of both sunlight from the left and moonlight from above.

In between the strand at the bottom of the frame and the cloud mountains at the top are expanses of trees; some areas of wild woodland, and some cultivated and ordered. To the left is a line of poplars, their trunks proceeding in regularly spaced, evenly upright lines. They form a fence-like barrier marking the limits of the more chaotic zone to its right. The unbroken mass of foliage, with rounded base curving up to tapered tip, looks solid and heavy, too weighty for the short stick-like boles upon which it rests. To the right of these tightly wrapped speciments is a tree whose wavering, curvilinear branches are exposed, skeletal and vulnerable. What foliage it has is tinged a peachy pink, and blends with the massing of clouds above and beyond. Rooted in bushes below, it connects earth with sky, and the ordered human plantation with the less evident, unmarshalled order of the forest. This wild area has an insubstantial appearance, its billowing layers, painted in autumnal russets and browns, like blooming cumulus clouds, or a roiling, muddy torrent. If we were to hold to the latter image, the Wittenham Clumps would rise like a local variant of the Isle of Avalon, Somewhere amongst this chaotic surface, ot the right of a tree which looks like an erect black glove, floats another luminous moon in half-shadowed phase. The black glove tree and another upright conifer in front of the billowing, roiling forest, look like dirty plumes of smoke, the result of some solemn pyre. Perhaps they are Cyprus trees, traditionally associated with death and the afterlife. White clouds of smoke blow out from the palm-edge of the black glove, two owls flying before its expanding front. Beneath this cloud is a black void, and to its right a dark archway leading into the woods, one of the dark-mouthed entryways leading into the heart of the landscape which are a feature of Nash’s late Wittenham Clumps pictures. Maybe it’s even an entrance to a subterraenean passage which leads to a resting place beneath the barrow mounds of the Clumps themselves.

Flowers in a Window - Winifred Nicholson

Winifred Nicholson’s Flowers at a Window (1939) in Birmingham is one of her paintings of thresholds, flowers placed at the interface between interior and exterior spaces. A winding, bluish-grey road joins with the bluish-grey of the window frame, making a direct connection between these two spaces. A dark arch in the distant blue hills resembles a cave mouth, hinting at a further threshold through which the mysteries of the landscape can be penetrated. The borders of the window frame the landscape, making it a picture within a picture, and giving it a slightly numinous quality – a world beyond. The terracotta of the bowl, the chocolate brown of the soil and the pale, tentative green of the bulb shoots stand out clearly and vividly against the subdued cream of the window ledge and the sandy brown of the hills beyond. The bare, outreaching branches of the trees and the barrenness of the hillsides indicate that winter prevails outside, but the new-blooming flowers within, set against this dead landscape, give promise of imminent spring.

Composition - John Selby Bigge

In John Selby Bigge’s Composition (1940) in Leeds, two cabbage leaves and a scallop shell rest on a shore, hugely oversized specimens all. A lacy spume of wave-edge foam arches into the bottom of the frame, cradling a speckled scatter of pebbles. The endless plain of sandy beach beyond, stretching to the far horizon, is where the sea should be. Some inversion has taken place, subconscious exposed and conscious mind concealed. The hard, jagged edges of the scallop’s exoskeletal ribs seem to have caught the soft cumulus of cloud drifting by above, and also create a trompe l’oeil tear in the vegetal leaf they overshadow.

Black Pyramids - John Armstrong

John Armstrong’s Phoenix (1938) in Leeds, erects a classical domed apse, starkly white and unadorned, which towers above the ruined façade of a 20th century house. Its monumentality and smooth perfection contrast strikingly with the jagged edges of exposed brick along the half-demolished outer wall of the house, and the scarred and torn surfaces of coloured wallpaper in what was once the inside wall. The apse seems to be an attempt to memorialise this wounded building, to make of it something permanent and sacred, a representation of the ruins and rubble from which it rises. It brings to mind Mervyn Peake’s blitz poem London, 1941, beginning with the words ‘half rubble, half pain’. Armstong’s Black Pyramids (1942) in Manchester brings together the solid forms of black pyramids and rectangular blocks in wooden colours, their arrangement suggestive of some highly regular desert megalopolis. A swarm of light, sandy cubes clusters in the shape of a sharp pointed (but pointless) exclamation mark, with a ballooning shadow extruding from its spinning needle base. The sky is textured like beaten bronze. The whole breathes a mysterious, alien air, with something portentous and Lovecraftian about it. His Lapping Waters (1944) in Birmingham is painted like a mosaic, in a style which is a kind of squared off version of pointillism. It gives the impression of something which belongs on a wall in some sacred space rather than on a canvas stretched out within a frame. Something which is pretending to be what it is not, in itself a rather surrealist gesture. The background sky looks like small panels of beaten copper - The sea appears frozen into whipped up pyramidally pointed waves, like magnetised metallic pellets piled up and carefully shaped, and from this gelid surface emerge three ossified claws, like the appendages (one extra to form a sharp-ended tripod) of some enormous mutant crab (shades of Guy N.Smith). The three claws balance some spherical form, its rilled surface suggestive either of a metallic ball or a microscopic form of intricately repetitive patterning – some sort of egg, perhaps. The tips of the claws have penetrated its surface, so that it is pinioned in its flight, its interior exposed to further probing. It’s a picture full of implied violence, rendered ritualistic by the static mosaic form.

Requiescat - Edward Wadsworth

The setting of Edward Wadsworth’s Requiescat (1940) in Leeds is a stony shore whose pebbles have the soft roundedness and pink and peppermint colouration of jelly beans. The cliffs in the background, with their turf fuzz and sheared white faces, look like the scrunched remains of granny smith apples. Their upward sloping aspect gives them the appearance of runways, launching suicidal vessels either into the pink sunset sky or the turquoise sea. The worn wrecks of ships grounded on the beach are bristled with exposed nails. They resemble rib cages, cracked open and splayed apart. The reds and the grey blues (which echo the colour of the ocean) suggest the remnants of a body which has rotted or been eroded away, traces of blood, sinew and muscle. A battered and warped teapot in the bottom right corner adds a poignant memory of domesticity, its deformed shape and salt-abraded surface rendering it an ahistorical artefact, lost in time as well as space. Wadsworth’s Composition on a Red Ground (1931), also in Leeds, shows that he felt the pull of both surrealism and abstraction. The abstract arrangement of forms here looks like a lost design from the Festival of Britain, or an anticipation of fifties graphic style. The elaborate frills and folds suggest cloth or paper, with some fanning out from what appears to be a blue crystalline form. The black shapes, bordered in white, resemble scrolls and have a mourning aspect, contrasting with the jauntiness of the frilled forms. All of these are set against a deep red background, suggesting a certain interiority, the screen of closed eyelids which absorb projections from the dreaming mind.

Polynesian Fantasy - Merlin Oliver Evans

Merlin Oliver Evans’ Polynesian Fantasy (1938) in Leeds is like an illustration from a textbook on alien biology. Odd chitinous forms are suggestive of insect life, with seedlike eggs or wormy larvae pointing to origins and early stages of mature forms. The tightly bound striations of raw meat on the figures on the right and left sides of the frame also resemble exposed musculature, specimens stripped down to reveal their mechanical workings. These are both very aggressive looking creatures, the one on the left having a head like a beaked axe designed for ripping and tearing, the one on the right topped with an elongated, protuberant cranium uncannily resembling HR Giger’s designs for the horrific creatures of the Alien films. Other forms resemble armoured pupae, whirring locusts or strange insect/bird hybrids, the bluish-grey object in the centre a semi-organic structure with hooved base stand. What looks like an egg lying on its table surface points to a certain sacral aspect, with the two meat-insects approaching from either side to pay obeisance. Or perhaps, given their erect, barbed and thorned penises, to pierce and impregnate the egg. This crudely vicious imagery points to a strain of aggressive sexuality which underlies a good deal of surrealist art. It’s one aspect which comes to the fore when the subconscious is cracked open, its contents spilled out and rearranged.

Landscape of the Grail - Cecil Collins

Cecil Collins’ Landscape of the Grail (1934) in Leeds owes more to a visionary tradition in British art, running from Blake through Samuel Palmer and, yes, Stanley Spencer. Collins created his own mythography, which drew on surrealism but was equally influenced by sacred art and notions of archetypal symbolism. Here, the sacred fire is contained within a stylised outcrop of volcanic rock, which emerges from the surrounding night. The dark blue and black is backdrop is imprinted with double lined square and diagonal grids, which gives it a quilted appearance. A comet flames through this quilted night, its arcing flight traced with a faint milky trail. It’s red eye in the palm of a pink starfish form hints at some nuclear form, making a connection between macro and microcosmic scales in the universe. The candle flame within the rock is contained within a red-veined leaf aura, like protectively cupped hands. The molten yellow light which it radiates flows through fissures in the rock, flowing downwards like a magma stream seen from a safely distant viewpoint. Two pinwheel flowers emerge from the slate-grey slopes. One blazes like a star, its central stigma pulsing out radial spokes of white light. The other bleeds light from its petals in ribboning cascades. They seem to feed on and grow directly from these molten streams running off from the burning heart of the grotto.

Night Work is About to Commence - Emmy Bridgwater

Emmy Bridgwater was one of a small number of female British surrealists (another being her friend Edith Rimmington), and was based in Birmingham, a central member of the Birmingham Surrealists group in the mid-century. Naturally enough, then, Night Work is About to Commence (1940-43) is to be found in Birmingham. It’s a very strange and weirdly absorbing painting. A long, shallow bathtub is sitting or perhaps gliding down a corridor lit with a buttery light. The fact that its leading curve (its prow) is clipped off by the edge of the frame hints at a slow movement across the sloping diagonal plane of the composition. It is stuffed with all manner of folded up deck chairs, screens, racks and frames, all seemingly connected in a jumbled assemblage. A pole with a serrated attachment of four jagged diamond shapes (mirrors?) joins the two distinct jumble piles (with fore and aft deck chair sails), one end having smashed through a frame. They hint at some mysterious machinery, the striped cloth of the deck chairs billowing out like Viking sails in a mysterious interior breeze. A crow or raven perches on a towel draped over the edge of the bath, staring down with a beady grey eye at what might be a bath sponge, which appears to be emitting a low level bioluminescent glamour. On the bottom left, the edge of some brown wooden box or stool intrudes, its squared off right angle contrasting with the curved lip of the bath.

Press for Making Shells - Graham Sutherland

In Graham Sutherland’s Press for Making Shells (1941) in Manchester, the machinery is given a monstrous life of its own. The shadows in the recessed panel of its rectangular ‘head’ looks like a hungry, gaping maw, whilst the bell-like boiler on top is a cranium in which the mechanistic impulses which drive it clatter away. The belching steam issuing from its obscure recesses have an almost solid, semi-organic appearance, manipulating appendages with stubby, grasping digits – Robbie the Robot arms. The flames beneath the stomping rods of the legs are very Blakean, stylised and resembling savage petals or sharply tapering butterfly wings. They tint the surrounding mouldering green, with a rosy blush. The sickly, institutional green infects the two figures in the bottom left of the frame, who are reduced to de-individualised outlines. They feed the flame as if tending to the altar of a terrible god.

Ruined Cottage, North Wales - John Piper

John Piper’s landscapes often have the static, solid quality of theatrical backdrops, many of which he did indeed design. Ruined Cottage, North Wales (1943) in Manchester depicts a cottage which has reverted to the landscape from which its materials were taken. The remains of the ruggedly constructed wall to the left now resemble the outcropping of a tor, with the hint of a visored, chthonic head, angular jaw jutting out and elephantine ear listening out for approaching footsteps. The far wall rises like a moorland hill, shaded in the brown of dead bracken and lit by a mysterious light. The dark sky has a tarry quality, with the texture of canvas and paint giving the impression of windblown motion and scattered rain.

Crater - Richard Murry

Richard Murry’s Crater (1941) in Manchester demonstrates the way in which war creates naturally and terribly surrealistic landscapes, as Paul Nash had demonstrated in the First World War. Here, the devastation moves from the battlefronts to the cities, with Murry depicting the aftermath of an aerial bombardment. The ashen palette, spotted with patches of lichenous yellow, and topped with a heavy strip of sky in tombstone grey, provides an expressionistic evocation of the physical and emotional wreckage. The crater in the forefront of the composition is like the swallowing mouth of some surfacing leviathan. It looks like a volcanic crater, which has wreaked havoc on the city in a latterday Pompeii eruption. Still smoking ruins in the background indicate that the destruction has come from another source, however.

Maples Demolition, Euston Road - Frank Auerbach

Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester art galleries are particularly strong on the art of the early and mid-century period. But lets take a few tentative steps into the post-war period. Frank Auerbach’s Maples Demolition, Euston Road (1960) in Leeds
Employs his usual thickly applied and roughly textured layers of oil paint. Here, he represents the exposed structure of the city with a series of straight lines scored into the surface. The prevailing yellows, along with the rust red of iron beams, gives a feeling of a scene saturated with dazzling midday light, a scorching, almost solid heat. The diagonal which bisects the frame like a slash through the canvas could be a supporting strut, the shooting path of a piece of thrown debris, or a focussed beam of searing radiance. A door is incongruously placed in the top right hand corner, two parallel diagonal lines pointing down from its marooned rectangle, marking the space where a staircase used to be. A regularly divided succession of vertically stacked rectangles in the background marks a high rise block visible beyond the shell of this old building, an indication of what will rise on this site. The seemingly abstract forms of the painting resolve themselves more clearly into the ruined interior the more you stare at it, subtle gradations in colour making themselves apparent. Features stand out with a three dimensional solidity, which is only partly due to the knobbly relief patterns created by the accretions of hardened paint.

Paper Mill, Men and Paper Bales - Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough’s Paper Mill, Men and Paper Bales (1953) in the Hepworth Wakefield shows her moving towards abstraction, with two human figures included but squeezed into the top of the composition. If the title didn’t tell us that they were surveying a field of paper bales, we’d be none the wiser, and if they were taken out of the frame we’d essentially be looking at an abstract work. The ordered geometry of the creamy white background, divided with broad strokes of grey, is disrupted in the centre right of the frame. Order is torn and shredded and thrown into a chaotic knot of fragmented shapes. Spurts and spots of bright red against the dirty whites and ochres seem to reflect the violence of this disruption.

After the Meal - Jack Smith

Jack Smith would make a more abrupt transition into a pop-influenced abstraction in the 60s, which would mark a complete break from his earlier, unambiguously figurative style. An example of the latter is to be found in After The Meal (1952) in Wakefield. It’s imbued with a strange, haunted variety of off-centre realism, which brings to mind David Lynch and Eraserhead. The domestic interior is largely drained of significant colour, leaving only the yellow of cutlery bone handles, tablecloth patterning and furniture wood. The objects on the table, remnants of the titular meal, have a more palbable presence than the baby, who gazes into space from his mother’s shoulder with empty black button eyes, and the girl in her shapeless brown dress heading for the evening streets beyond the open door. She glances back and meets the viewer’s regard with a sullen indifference, tempered with a slight quizzical tilt of the head. And with that unreadable look, we will leave her to head out into the mysteries of the 50s night, and into a future which would soon blare into brighter primary coloured pop explosions.

PART ONE is over here.