Paul Nash's English Pyramids

 

If you're an admirer of Paul Nash then this new book may already be on your radar, but I would also recommend it to people who don't know much about the debonair but sometimes challenging British artist. Pyramids in England has the two main characteristics of a good art book: a wide range of images that are excellently reproduced; and just the right amount of brisk, readable text.

The author has managed a website dedicated to Nash and his pyramids, ie the Wittenham Clumps, for some years. I thought the book might be a bit Clump-centric, but though the twin hills south of Oxford certainly loom large there is more than enough added material about Nash's life and work to make it compelling reading. Some of the photos were new to me. In one, the character of his wife Margaret (nee Odeh) shines through. In another, we see Nash among his extended family, a sturdy English group who must have found his career quite baffling.

Anyway, enough from me. If you have a lover of Modern British art in your life, you really should buy them this for Christmas.

You can buy the book at good bookshops, like this one.

 

Paul Nash and the Wittenham Clumps

Paul Nash, Wittenham (1935)

Tim Mainstone alerted my attention to this phenomenal website, which thrillingly links an artist, the artist's paintings and the place that inspired them. Paul Nash visited and painted the copse-topped hills around Wittenham throughout his career, beginning a century ago in 1911 when, according to his rather imaginative autobiography 'Outline', he slipped away from a hunting party to discover his vocation as a landscape painter.

Modernity has not been particularly kind to Nash's special Places. The magical Iver Heath, where he painted gardens and elm trees, is now a short, fast jaunt from the M25 or the M4, and the ancient landscape surrounding Wittenham is dominated today by the power station at Didcot.

Rather than despair at this evidence of Progress, the website's authors suggest that the surrealist in Nash would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of ancient hillforts and modern chimneys. I'm not sure that I agree. He did after all dedicate his 'Shell Guide to Dorset' to 'All those courageous enemies of development to whom we owe what is left of England', and he was not at all happy when Avebury was spruced up for the tourist industry in the late 1930s.

He would have loathed power stations and motorways and those giant warehouses that nowadays spring up almost overnight close to strategic junctions. Although it isn't manmade structures that now block his long-range view of the Clumps from Boars Hill, but fully-grown trees.