Paul Nash is an English abstract painter, sculptor, graphic artist. During the Second World War, he worked as a reporter artist at the Ministry of the Air Force and saw all the horrors of human slaughter through the eyes of a pilot. Creativity Nash fully reflects the tragedy of a generation whose youth coincided with the years of the First World War, and maturity – with the terrible years of the fascist occupation. The fragility of human life, very often becoming a toy in someone’s hands, which can be broken and turned over by chance – this is what fills his work, is the main theme of his works.
Nash himself was a direct participant in both wars, more than once looked into the eyes of death; he saw hundreds and thousands of dead people, destroyed cities. His own severe wound did not break his will. Even being seriously ill, he took a plane to the sky, then to transfer to the canvas a lonely field seen by a pilot with rare figures of orderlies picking up English soldiers strangled with yperi. The wreckage of the aircraft, crippled people for a long time did not release Nash.
Again and again, he took a pencil and a brush in his hands to remind people of the terrible tragedy. His “Dead Sea” depicts a disorderly gathering of dead Nazi planes, as if reassured forever insane element that has destroyed millions of lives.
Work on the picture began after a series of photographs taken at the cemetery of German aircraft. The background of the picture – the transparent night sky, penetrated by lifeless moon rays – only aggravates the feeling of a terrible dream, from which you want to wake up as soon as possible. Piles of deadly metal appear in the picture as a creepy mirage that does not shatter with the rising of the sun.
The style of the artist was developed over the years. Immediately after graduating from Slade school, he worked in a traditional manner, then, as cubism spread in England, he began to create non-subject landscapes, combining elements of geometric painting with abstraction.
Drawings from life, military reports, sculptures in the bomb shelters of the London Underground… In his works, always felt the hidden pathos and ideas of humanism, of course, moving the world. It is not by chance that on the canvas “We are building the New World” the rising sun pours new life into the dried-up trees.
In 1933, having come close to the most important abstract artist, Ben Nicholson, Nash organized the “First Division” – a group of painters who had nothing in common with the stylistics of artistic mastery, but “stood on the same artistic platform”. The group did not exist for long, but it provided the basis for the development and unification of the work of formalist artists.
Finding a way of expression Nash did not stop and already being a famous master. Finding new techniques both in painting and in sculpture, allowed him to convey majesty and monumentality in sketchy compositions in essence, which did not leave the audience indifferent. For Nash, a clear sense of completeness is very characteristic, even in surrealistic and abstract works, to which he arrives at the end of his life and creative activity, which had a considerable influence on artists of the 20th century. far beyond his native country.
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