But Nash’s greatest WWI painting, and, at 6ft (1.8m) across, his most monumental, is the utterly arresting The Menin Road (1919). This time, unusually, we find the barely discernable figures of four soldiers attempting to move across the unforgiving, shell-shattered terrain. The painting’s dramatic diagonals and verticals show how Nash had adopted the hard intersecting planes of the English avant-garde Vorticist group. Commissioned by the Ministry of Information for a Hall of Remembrance that was never built, the painting was intended to celebrate the national ideals of heroism and sacrifice. This complex work is, perhaps deliberately, ambivalent on that front. But it does nonetheless express a kind of doomed magnificence.
WikipediaDue to his war experiences, Nash suffered a terrible and protracted breakdown. In 1921, he moved with his wife to Dymchurch on the Kent coast, where he painted some of his most unrelentingly stark paintings of the barren coastline. In one, Winter Sea, which he actually began in 1925 but didn’t finish until years later, the waves of the sea are shown as angular folds in grey, black and white. The close-up surface of the sea, the severe perspective and the pitch-black horizon all suggest that we might be looking at a precipitous pathway leading toward eternal darkness.
AlamyNash’s adult life was bookended by war. When the lights dimmed across Europe a second time, he was again commissioned to work as an official war artist, though this time Nash, whose health was increasingly fragile, remained in Britain. His most powerful painting of World War Two is Totes Meer, the title meaning ‘Dead Sea’ in German. Instead of showing us a path towards eternal darkness, Nash painted a surreally undulating sea of crashed German bombers at Cowley, Oxfordshire, the site of a ‘graveyard’ for crashed enemy planes.
