James Fox, 'British Masters' & 'Paul Nash in Pictures'

Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection, Cookham, 1926

After an eye-opening first instalment, art lovers around Britain were keen to see what James Fox would get up to in the second episode of 'British Masters', and he didn't disappointment. Lingering shots of a nude Stanley Spencer (did somebody say 'flaccid'?) were followed by a piece proclaiming the virtues of obnoxious Royal Academy president Sir Alfred Munnings. A deeply unfashionable artist, we were told, and it wasn't hard to see why; it was much more difficult to see why Dr Fox had picked him out for special praise.

Until, that is, we reached the finale of that piece, in which an inebriated Munnings launched a public tirade against modern art in general and Picasso in particular. Not for the only time in the programme, the excellent archive footage and recordings had more allure than the art. 'In Search of England' was the title of a book by bestselling interwar travel writer HV Morton (whose 'In Search of London' is still in print and one of the best books EVER on the city), and in the programme Dr Fox used the documentary-travelogue form to great effect.

Nash and Spencer aside, he mostly avoided the famous names of the period and instead chose artists whose work reflected the concerns and conflicts of the age: Munnings and the 'ordinary' William Coldstream stood on two sides of a divide represented in literature by Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. If this made interesting viewing it didn't necessarily show British art at its best, and Dr Fox will no doubt be lambasted as a reactionary himself - have we had a female artist yet? I don't think so...  However, the day was saved by the in-depth study of Spencer and a fascinating final section on John Piper, whose exquisite painting of Coventry Cathedral, still smouldering after the previous night's bombing, has a genuine, understated greatness.

The film of Piper discussing Gainsborough and Picasso was a curiosity - what a strange old bird he was - and the sequence on the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition was fun too. I loved the old footage of people travelling by bus to Avebury, although I don't remember reading anywhere that Nash discovered the ancient stones by chance, after suffering an asthma attack on a bus. Is this really what happened?

John Piper, Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940

It would be good to know as I've been delving into Nash's life and work this year in preparation for a new book, 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', which will be published by the Mainstone Press in the autumn. As with the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series, the new book focuses on a selection of twenty-two paintings, each accompanied by a concise essay; we've decided to dedicate the first volume to Nash's oil paintings, which he used to express the ideas that pre-occupied him most. A second volume will focus on his gorgeous watercolours, which were admired greatly during his lifetime but which are now rarely seen in public.

Paul Nash, The Wanderer, 1911

The more I learn about Nash the more fascinating a figure he becomes. Born in 1889 he had the kind of Victorian childhood where Mother was seen for an hour in the evening. He read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and from them gained a lifelong love of nonsense and wordplay, and though occasionally ill was robust enough to star in his school soccer team. Any sensible career path was cut off for him by his hopeless maths, yet critics later described his paintings as 'mathematical'. He seems to have been motivated by an intense inner vision, but took centre stage in the public debates of the time.

His struggle to reconcile modernity and Britishness was rather like Piper's. Nash tried abstraction, but quickly returned to the painting of natural forms - stones, leaves and trees. Although he greatly admired (and in some cases knew personally) Picasso, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Magritte and other modern artists, he continued to find inspiration in nature and constantly sought subjects in the British landscape that reflected his inner preoccupations; his discovery of Avebury in the summer of 1933 was part of this quest. His frequent journeys to France, including a hilarious jaunt around the Riviera with a young Edward Burra, were also part of the process.

Paul Nash, Equivalents for the Megaliths, 1935

So, another contentious and gripping programme from James Fox comes to an end, and we must wait a whole week for the next. What on earth will he say, I wonder, about post-war painting?

Jon Snow: Paul Nash, Jeremy Deller and The Art of War

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918 (IWM)

The final instalment of Channel 4's survey of British art gave us Jon Snow's personal survey of the war artist's role from 1914 until the present. Given the seasoned news reporter's experience of war's grim reality, it is perhaps not surprising that the flavour of the hour-long film was anti-war.

Jon Snow

We began with Paul Nash and Richard Nevinson, whose violent, often cynical portrayals of trench warfare remain the visual complement to the poetry of Owen and Sassoon. One or two odd lapses aside - Nash may have become a Surrealist in later life, but could not have been one in 1917 as the movement did not exist - Snow captured perfectly the cultural shift that occurred during the course of the war, as early militarism gave way to horror at the soldiers' suffering. A visit to see Stanley Spencer's work at Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire was especially moving, and the comparison between the controversial Nevinson and Gulf War artist John Keane proved effective.

The treatment of the artists' role in World War II was less good, however, perhaps because characters like Paul Nash did not fit Snow's vision of the artist as messenger of war's horrors. Nash was pictured, sketching wrecked Nazi aircraft, but nothing was said of his attitude to the conflict.

Paul Nash, Totes Meer, 1941 (Tate)

The Paul Nash of 1939 was fiercely in favour of war against Nazism, and his painting 'Totes Meer' - which was based on his sketches of the Cowley aircraft dump - exudes a grim satisfaction in the aerial invaders' fate.

Instead of following the careers of war artists like Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone, who travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force and recorded the evacuation from Dunkirk, Snow focused on the Home Front. In part this was perhaps because his admitted favourites were Stanley Spencer - a pacifist who painted shipbuilders rather than soldiers - and Henry Moore, whose tube station sleepers proved such a memorable response to the terrors of aerial bombardment.

The rolling exhibition of war art shown at the National Gallery from the summer of 1940 did of course contain fine paintings from the Home Front, but it also featured, over the course of the war, thousands of paintings from around the world.

Steve McQueen, Queen & Country, 2007

Kenneth Clark and the War Artists' Advisory Committee commissioned artists to cover every aspect of the war; some gloried in grand battles, while others showed scenes of suffering and devastation. All brought their own attitudes, experience and vision to the vast, complex subject of a global war, leaving us with a huge, startlingly diverse body of work.

The Imperial War Museum website has thousands of images, some of which glorify war, while others more closely resemble the Great War paintings of Nash and Nevinson.

So to the present day, and here the programme found its touch again, with fascinating reports on the work and experiences of modern war artists Steve McQueen and Jeremy Deller. It was fascinating to see how contemporary artists have taken on the subject of war, and equally interesting to follow their progress. Having found life as an embedded war artist unstimulating McQueen had the brilliant idea of printing stamps showing portraits of dead UK servicemen and women, but he has so far failed to persuade the Royal Mail to use his stamps.

Jeremy Deller, Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Deller, meanwhile, had the equally brilliant idea of exhibiting a car smashed by a bomb in Baghdad street - I wonder if he had heard about the exhibition of wrecked cars JG Ballard put on in 1970. Ballard found that reaction to his crashed vehicles was vitriolic and often physically violent, but when Deller toured the United States with his exhibit he found responses more verbally confrontational.

The car is currently on show at the Imperial War Museum in London, among the tanks and planes, under the title 'Baghdad, 5 March 2007'. If you go along, make sure you visit the art gallery upstairs, where you'll find paintings by Nash and Nevinson, and by Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer and numerous others.

'The Art of War' is available to watch here. Overall, it is a moving, beautifully composed and thoughtful film by a man who has seen his share of wars.