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Artist or Maker: Paul Nash (1899-1946)
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Provenance: Margaret Nash.
Collection Nash Trustees.
with Agnews, London, 1968.
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Exhibited: London, Surrealist Section, Artists International Association Exhibition, April 1937, no. 201, as 'Correlation'.
London, Leicester Galleries, New Paintings by Paul Nash, May 1938, no. 18.
Cambridge, Gordon Fraser Gallery, Oils, Watercolours and Exhibits by Paul Nash, July 1939, no. 6.
C.E.M.A. touring exhibition, Applied Design 1908-1942 by Paul Nash, 1943, no. 59.
Cheltenham, Cheltenham Art Gallery, Paintings, Drawings and Designs by Paul Nash, June 1945, no. 3.
London, Tate Britain, Paul Nash 1889-1946: Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, March - May 1948, no. 42.
London, Leicester Galleries, Paul Nash: A Private Collection of Watercolours and Drawings (Margaret Nash's Collection), May 1953, no. 5.
Oxford, St. Hilda's College, Paintings and Watercolours by Paul Nash from the Collections of Mrs. Paul Nash and Mrs. Michael Dawney, January 1959, no. 3.
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Art in Britain 1930-1940 Centred Around Axis, Circle and Unit One, March - April 1965, no. 110. London, Agnews, British Paintings 1900-1968, April 1968, no. 23.
Aldeburgh, Peter Pears Gallery, Festival Exhibition, June 2006, no. 11.
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Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Art in Britain 1930-1940 Centred Around Axis, Circle and Unit One, London, Marlborough Fine Art, 1965, no. 110, illustrated.
Kunstwerk, July 1965.
A. Causey, Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p. 437, no. 890, illustrated.
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Notes: One of Surrealism's aims as an emancipatory undertaking is to suspend the conventional identity of objects and 'purify' our approach to it. Paul Nash's contribution to British Surrealism was precisely to have raised the notion of 'encounter' to the level of a surrealist principle in Britain, working from found objects, the cornerstone of surrealist aesthetics, in which Breton had first seen the concrete precipitate of one's unconscious desires. Here as often during his surrealist years (roughly between 1935 and 1939), Nash is referring to stones found when walking in fields or on beaches, pebbles, flintstones, fossils, in other words traces of the prehistoric past of man, whose presence he emphasizes by enlarging or foregrounding them. During the process, the 'objects' acquire vaguely human shapes, here obviously masculine and feminine. Interestingly enough, this results in the blending of three main realms of man's relation to nature; indeed, these vestiges of the geological, mineral origins of life are given an animal quality, inseparable in turn from the 'intellectual', mental decision of the artist to 'stage' the encounter. Surrealism resides in this fictional reality which precipitates the immemorial past into our present times.
M. R.
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