Paul Nash in Swanage
Can you tell us more about Paul Nash please
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Posted by David H to swanage view at 7/28/2006 10:35:48 AM
posted by The Postman @ 8:21 PM 2 comments
2 Comments:
At 8:24 PM, The Postman said...
There's a good book called 'Paul Nash in Swanage" by local author Pennie Denton. I'm sure the Bookshop opposite Somerfields will have it or can get it.
At 8:25 PM, The Postman said...
Let me start with a plug for "Paul Nash in Swanage -Seaside Surrealism". by Swanage writer Pennie Denton.
This is what the Tate says about him:
"Paul Nash (1889-1946) is one of the most important artists of the first half of the twentieth century and the most evocative landscape painter of his generation. He is best known for his work as an official war artist, producing some of the most memorable images of both the First and Second World Wars.
Nash was also a pioneer of modernism in Britain, promoting the avant-garde European styles of abstraction and Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933 he co-founded the influential modern art movement Unit One with fellow artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and the critic Herbert Read. It was a short-lived but important move towards the revitalisation of English art in the inter-war period.
Nash, however, found his personal inspiration in the English landscape and he saw himself in the tradition of English mystical painters William Blake and Samuel Palmer. He was particularly drawn to landscapes with a sense of ancient history: grassy burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts and the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge. For him these sites had a talismanic quality which he called genius loci, or 'the spirit of a place', and he painted them repeatedly."
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Posted by Anonymous to swanage view at 7/28/2006 12:47:01 PM
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Heres a little more. Nash stayed in Swanage for some time in the 1930s and considered moving here but in the end went to Hampstead, complaining that the locals here were pretty dreadful and the trippers "quite unspeakable", a view endorsed by many to this day.
According again to the Tate gallery website, "The Victorian seaside town of Swanage was one of Nash’s favourite places. He said its combination of ‘beauty, ugliness and the power to disquiet’ held a ‘strange fascination’ that was a form of ‘natural surrealism’."
In some ways its got more surreal. You turn a street corner on a misty November day and encounter a crocodile of Japanese schoolgirls wearing kilts. You visit restaurants and eat Thai food cooked by Koreans or Italian food cooked by Poles. There is a distinct opening there for marketing Swanage as the home of English surrealism.
Paul Nash is featured in the Swanage Seen Art Trail, a plinth with his painting, 'Event on the Downs', a portrait by Helen Muspratt and biography by Pennie Denton is placed in Sandpit Field, Swanage.
Art Trail leaflets are available at the Tourist Information Centre and the Heritage Centre, Swanage.
Look out for guided walks!
Carlotta Barrow, Swanage Seen
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