Paul Nash: The Ghosts of War British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash

In the summer of 1912, a 22-year-old Paul Nash felt inspired

to draw these towering hills in Oxfordshire.

Alone, Nash would walk the hills, called the Wittenham Clumps.

For him, they were the birthplace of his art,

a place of magic and inspiration.

Nash called them the pyramids of his small world.

Nash was just setting out on his restless journey as an artist.

Brilliantly original, yet also enigmatic.

He would come back here right at the end of his life

to immerse himself in his own English paradise,

and say his goodbyes to the world

with some of the most lyrical paintings of the 20th century.

But it wasn't Nash's destiny

to be a painter only of pastoral landscapes.

World War I transformed the landscape of Belgium and France,

and scarred Nash's soul forever.

He painted its muddy bloody abyss.

He brooded on its dead, and never forgot them.

Nash was a brilliant artist of a very English kind.

Strong feelings are expressed, but with a certain reserve.

After the living nightmare of war,

he would paint life in peacetime as a waking dream,

thronged with disconcerting images.

He would rarely paint the people he knew, and never paint himself.

Only ghosts inhabit his world.

The paths they walked, the damage they brought.

The trails they've left.

I want to follow his trail, walk in his footsteps,

and find out, if I can, what inspired Paul Nash,

and what haunted him.

Paul Nash's love of nature began during his childhood.

When he was 11, his family came here,

to Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire.

They'd moved from London to help Nash's mother,

who suffered from mental illness.

Nash wrote in later life about how his mother's sickness

cast a shadow over his childhood.

But, from the bottom of the garden, he and his brother and sister

would escape to play in the woods beyond.

These woods near the family home at Iver Heath were his playground.

He used to come here with his younger brother John,

and his much younger sister Barbara.

Paul often used to carry Barbara on his shoulders.

Between them, they turned this place into a kind of

Swallows and Amazons paradise.

Paul gave these woods a nickname.

He called them Hawk's Wood after the birds of prey that hover

overhead, and I think it's a revealing choice of name

because, after all, he was himself something of a hawk.

Rather aloof, rather solitary, someone who lived through his eyes.

And I wonder if it wasn't here during his childhood

that he acquired his lifelong habit of relating more easily to nature,

to the landscape, to trees, to birds, than to people.

I think here, more than anywhere else, he truly felt able to breathe.

On leaving school, instead of joining the Navy,

as his mother wanted, Nash got a job

with a firm of book illustrators and went to art classes by night.

Angel and Devil, a drawing of 1910, has a nightmare feel about it.

It's like a moonlit vision of Hawk's Wood, where he played as a boy,

but here, the hawk is a winged devil attempting to snare its victim.

Later that year, Nash's mother died.

He was 21 years old.

Nash continued to visit his widowed father at the family home.

The two shared a close relationship,

even closer now with the loss of Nash's mother.

In the sunny warmth of the morning room,

Nash developed his work as a burgeoning artist

by sketching the natural world outside.

It's fascinating to me to see this beautiful early drawing,

simply called Tree,

in the very house where, I'm sure, he created it.

The view is as if from that window.

Those elm trees once stood in that gap.

They all died from Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970s,

but here they are in Nash's work.

It is very much, I think, an image of nature

seen from the confines of a garden. He tells us what time of year it is.

A little daffodil in the foreground.

These squadrons of swallows flying in tight formation. It's spring.

It's a picture full of a sense of air, breath.

There's a lot of sky in it.

The trees seem to reach up towards that sky.

It could have been a picture of nothing at all,

just a view from his window,

but he's somehow managed to infuse it with a sense of idealism,

dare I say spirituality.

It's as if those trees aren't just growing, they're aspiring.

They're breathing in the air.

Where did Nash get his style from?

This dense crosshatching, this elaborate working of detail,

conjures up the fairy-tale mood

of late 19th-century book illustration.

Nash wants to create an image that is simultaneously

a depiction of what he sees from his house,

but he wants to give it a kind of spiritual lift.

He wants to express to us

the way in which he experiences nature as a kind of vision.

There's a lot of idealism to this image.

With the encouragement of his father, Nash moved to London

after winning a place at the highly selective Slade School of Art.

Nash's class, as seen here in a group photograph,

included some of the great young artists of the day.

Stanley Spencer,

David Bomberg,

CRW Nevinson.

But Nash felt he didn't fit in.

He didn't even turn up for the photograph.

In later years, he recalled being deeply wounded

by head tutor Henry Tonks,

who criticised him for his inability to draw the human figure.

It was then that Nash decided to make nature his art school.

He walked the countryside alone, searching for what he called

the "Genius Loci" - the spirit of the place.

Instead of a life class, with its carefully posed nudes,

he studied the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire.

Instead of artist's models, he depicted trees.

Human figures, when they do appear in his work, seem like ghosts.

Nash was a self-made artist and he was his own impresario too,

organising his first exhibition at a London gallery in 1912.

Landscapes, of course, in watercolour and pen and ink.

A great success.

But Nash didn't avoid the life class altogether.

He had friends who were painters and, one day in 1913,

while visiting their studios as they were sketching the female models,

his eye was caught by a young lady called Margaret Odeh.

Margaret was a worker for women's rights, an Oxford graduate,

and the daughter of an Egyptian cleric.

Nash found Margaret and her beautiful brown eyes

singularly lovely and elusive.

Margaret found the good-looking and charming Nash hard to resist.

The following year, the couple married.

Life was going very well for Paul Nash.

Then, his world began to fall apart.

1914.

The outbreak of the First World War.

Nash signed up.

First, he served in the Artists Rifles, the traditional regiment

of choice for painters and sculptors.

But the duties involved home service only.

Tired of endless training exercises, Nash was determined to see action.

So he transferred to the Hampshire Regiment.

In May 1917, he was sent to Ypres, to the front,

where he encountered a world unlike any he had known.

As a sensitive, rather bookworm-ish boy, Paul Nash had developed

a great taste for the absurd classics of English literature.

Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland,

Edward Lear's nonsense poetry,

and I think when he came to the front,

to him it was as if he'd suddenly stepped into one of those

absurdist worlds of the imagination,

except here, it was all actually happening.

Imagine a world where men had to live in holes burrowed underground,

where they had to spend most of their days not in cities,

not in houses, but in these strange metal scars cut into the landscape.

How very strange.

How sinister.

Nash had armed himself with pen and paper, as well as his rifle.

As the war went on, he'd become increasingly fascinated

by this half-buried world,

peopled by anxious young soldiers, smoking, waiting to go over the top.

There's a sense of anticipation in many of his war sketches

from 1917-18.

Of something terrible about to happen.

It was.

But Nash wouldn't be there to see it,

at least not during his first spell at the front.

On 25th May 1917, so focused on his drawing

that he didn't watch his footing,

Nash tripped into a trench, breaking his ribs.

A comical self-inflicted injury

which meant that he escaped the tragedy

about to befall his regiment.

Nash was stretchered back to England, and just a few days later,

the first shots were fired in the Battle of Passchendaele.

The most terrible battle of the war.

Four months long, 200,000 British dead or wounded,

Nash's regiment wiped out.

Tellingly perhaps,

he never spoke about his dead comrades later in life.

Perhaps he had no words.

But he did paint a picture

during his convalescence in Gloucestershire.

The Cherry Orchard. July 1917.

But these are winter trees,

lined up like crosses in a cemetery,

death in life.

Swallows swoop unnaturally low,

or maybe they're snagged in the mesh of the barbed wire fence.

It's ambiguous.

Was Nash counting himself lucky?

Or was he counting the cost?

What we do know for sure is that he became obsessed with returning

to the trenches, not as a soldier, but as an official war artist.

In late 1917, after months of petitioning the Foreign Office,

the artist finally got his commission.

Why did Nash choose to paint, rather than fight?

Because he was on a private mission.

He wanted to honour the ghosts of the dead,

to tell the truth about the horror that had done for them.

In doing so, he was about to invent a completely new kind of war art.

Paul Nash was a very unusual war artist

in the sense that he didn't see war as horror, terror,

bombs going off, bodies being shattered.

He saw war primarily as a terribly artificial,

awfully unnatural,

dislocation of landscape.

It created this network of tunnels,

formed from corrugated iron in which men were forced to live,

and then, when they emerged from those tunnels,

after the battle was over, that was Nash's subject,

the aftermath - what did they see?

They saw a landscape cratered,

ruined, devastated,

full of cinder-black trees sticking up like outraged exclamation marks.

A landscape of nightmare.

A nightmare that had come true.

From July 1917 to the end of the war,

Nash would obsessively depict the landscapes of battle

and their detritus.

Churned up trenches, shattered artillery, broken down vehicles.

The Menin Road,

a scarred and pitted world,

rubble and wire,

dead trees,

stagnant pools of oily water,

furtive soldiers scurrying, nowhere to hide.

The painter's style has suddenly changed.

The forms are more isolated,

the fairy-tale mood of his earlier work has been bombed out of him.

It's oil on canvas, not pen on paper,

and it's monumental.

Six feet across, the scale of history painting.

It was an official commission,

and the Ministry of Information encouraged Nash

to look to a famous Renaissance battle painting by Paolo Uccello.

But comparison shows just how subversive The Menin Road is.

Uccello shows war as heroic chivalry, men jousting.

Nash shows us what war looks like

when chivalry has been gassed and mortared.

He turns Uccello's lances into fractured tree stumps,

Uccello's noble corpses into tumbled breeze blocks and scraps of metal.

In modern war, you can't even find the bodies.

And, as for Uccello's pastoral battlescape,

it's become a wasteland, a place of terror.

Where even the sky looks torn or incinerated.

To what extent did Nash exaggerate what he saw?

Flanders today is nothing like the war zone he painted,

though the battlefields beneath can still be sensed.

Dominick Dendoven is an historian of First World War Ypres,

who's done much research on the places Nash painted.

Dominick, where exactly are we?

Well, this place was then called Sanctuary Woods,

which is actually on the former front line of the First World War.

Did Paul Nash actually come here?

Would he have once stood on this spot?

This is where he was in late 1917.

But by then, the landscape was, of course,

completely different to what we see today.

The relief is more or less the same,

but you have to take away all the trees.

What he would have seen then were just stumps of trees.

The stumps would be the only thing reminding him

of this being a human landscape, an earthly landscape.

It resembled more like the moon than like Earth.

The dominating colour would have been brown.

Brown and black throughout the whole landscape as far as you could see.

-We are actually entering the space of a crater.

-Yes, indeed.

This is a crater which would already have been here

when Nash was here because this is a crater from 1915, 1916.

But this, the relief, the contours in this landscape, are man-made.

Made by the war.

When my grandparents,

my great-grandparents, came back after the war,

and they went to the village they once lived in,

they could not even find the place where once their house had stood,

which means that there were not even ruins.

There was just rubble as far as the eye could see.

So, it's an utter wasteland.

It was like entering a gate to another world.

Nash depicted the war as if he were looking into the mouth of hell

or Hades.

But there was no River Styx here.

Just flooded bomb craters.

Beneath their waters, an unseen world of the dead,

mutilated in their multitudes.

Time has softened the craters of the Great War.

Grass has grown up on the slopes. This one has filled up with water.

It looks almost picturesque. It could nearly be Monet's pond.

It wasn't like that when Paul Nash came here in 1917.

This was a great, black, dark hole,

a huge wound,

exploded into the flesh of the landscape.

These craters weren't caused by aerial bombardment.

They were caused by the actions of the tunnellers,

the subterranean soldiers whose job it was to dig under enemy lines

to lay explosives and then set them off.

What a death it must have been.

And how horrific that death must have seemed to Paul Nash

who, as a little boy,

had this recurrent nightmare of being smothered.

Well, here was a death where, at the instant of your annihilation,

you were smothered, you were buried.

Imagine the landscape.

That which to Nash was always the great symbol of security,

the unchanging aspect of the world,

suddenly the landscape turned into a creature,

a shape-shifting monster that might at any moment swallow you up.

There is something very understated about his images.

They look almost like the work of a map-maker, a topographer.

Well, in a sense, they are topography.

But they are the topography of an atrocious war.

Nash has sometimes been criticised for leaving out

the actual victims of war.

But to appreciate his reticence,

you have to understand what this war did to the human body.

And, above all, to the human face.

Nash's old tutor at the Slade, Henry Tonks, who'd trained as a surgeon,

made drawings of some of the worst injuries.

They're still preserved at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

What's the origin

of these truly extraordinary pastel drawings...

of men with facial injuries?

These were created by Henry Tonks

in his practice at Aldershot, and then later at Sidcup,

where the Queen Mary Hospital became a centre for specialist treatment

for soldiers with facial injuries.

You have an individual such as this man here.

You can see quite clearly the before and after of the process,

but in-between, there would have been maybe two or three operations,

so it's not just going from injury to being completely repaired.

I think they're remarkable

because of the way in which they show us -

we, who are so far now from the horror of that war -

just how appalling those injuries were.

Almost like images from nightmare.

One thought does occur to me.

I'm on the trail of Paul Nash and, of course,

the one thing that I can never see,

because he didn't paint any self-portraits,

I can't see Paul Nash at the front.

I can't see him, I can't picture him in my mind.

Looking at these, I've suddenly got this very uncanny sense that...

these are his eyes.

These are his eyes.

He writes with such anger and such outrage and such bewilderment,

and suddenly, looking at these eyes, I think yes,

these are the eyes that saw. This is what Paul Nash felt like.

Even when they're not looking at you directly,

you've still got that gaze coming out of the pastels at you.

It gives me a shiver.

You can still feel Paul Nash's anger,

the rage of a betrayed generation,

in this, the most apocalyptic of his battlescapes,

to which he gave the ironic title, We Are Making A New World.

Nash wrote to his wife Margaret

while he was painting it to say, "I am no longer an artist,

"I am a messenger who will bring back word

"from the men who are fighting

"to those who want the war to go on forever.

"It will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls."

It's a painting that gives the lie to the idea that Nash

left out the dead bodies of war, and painted only its landscapes.

Because this landscape is a body.

It's churned earth like burned flesh,

cratered and bubbled and horribly melted.

Its tree stumps like mutilated limbs.

The red clouds in the sky like scarred and angry flesh.

Duty and decorum and the dignity of the wounded

meant that he couldn't actually paint the victims of war,

but he found a way to paint their pain and suffering nonetheless.

And its truth does still burn

as brightly and defiantly as that Cyclops eye sun.

After the war, Paul and Margaret Nash

moved to Dymchurch on the coast of Kent.

An intriguing choice.

One of the closest places in all of England

to the killing fields of Flanders.

Nash would spend four difficult years here.

Money was tight, but there was little he could do about it.

He was suffering a breakdown.

During the war,

he'd painted landscapes to evoke the bodies of the dead.

Now, when he was able to work, he painted landscapes of the mind.

The mind of an uneasy survivor.

The sea wall stands ready for the onset of the tide.

The tide comes in, drowning the world.

Or is this an image of Paul Nash's mind,

drowning in unhappy feelings?

There's no doubt Nash felt terribly alone during his time at Dymchurch.

But gradually he came to realise that he wasn't the only painter

struggling with a sense of personal trauma

during these dislocated times.

In Europe, a new movement of artists

was developing a new language of art.

The language of dream and nightmare.

To express the sense that reality was out of joint.

They called themselves Surrealists, and their work Surrealism.

When Nash found out about Surrealism,

it gave him a new sense of hope that he wasn't on his own.

He was drawn to the pre-war cityscapes of Italian painter

Giorgio De Chirico, who never signed up with the Surrealists

but was admired by them as a pioneer of the ominous and the uncanny.

During the later 1920s,

Nash introduced unexpected dreamlike elements into his own pictures.

Inexplicable objects,

mystery buildings.

These deliberately unsettling jigsaw compositions

marked a bold change of direction.

Nash wasn't attempting to capture a slice of the world,

but a frame of mind.

He developed the approach further during the following decade,

becoming England's pre-eminent painter of the enigma.

Paul Nash's paintings of the 1930s are very mysterious.

Even the title of this one, Opening, is ambiguous.

Does it refer to a physical opening, a noun,

or could it be the verb, "opening".

Is it a depiction of the process of opening up?

If Nash is a surrealist, he is a very English kind of surrealist.

Very reserved.

His paintings are low-toned, they don't reach out and grab you.

You have to reach into them to try and clutch at their meanings.

I think in the case of this painting,

I feel that it's Nash's way of painting his own state of mind

at a kind of threshold moment in his own life.

Its subject after all is a threshold.

Two years before the picture was painted, his father had died.

A great break in his life. They had been very close.

His father had encouraged him in his desire to be an artist,

against the conservative disapproval of the rest of the family.

So his father has gone, and, on top of that,

he's sold the family house, Iver Heath,

which he loved, in Buckinghamshire.

This detail here, the exposed brickwork,

seems to me to suggest the idea of a house that's been left

or perhaps abandoned.

The opening perhaps suggests Nash's sense that he has to enter

to embark on a new kind of life from now on.

But there are also elements in the painting which suggest that,

as far as he's concerned,

that opening to a new life is not going to be easily found.

There's a barrier right down the middle of this dream doorway.

There's another barrier at the bottom.

And, while the sea behind seems bright blue, calm,

very much a Mediterranean Sea, not the Channel,

while that seems to illustrate some idea in Nash's mind

that he might find some form of tranquillity,

he might find some form of beauty and fulfilment in his life,

he knows that it's not going to be easy.

At the heart of the painting falls a shadow.

In an attempt to break out of the shadows,

Nash put himself at the forefront of the English response

to European Surrealism.

In 1933, the usually solitary artist took the unusual step

of founding a modern art group, Unit One.

In their only show they exhibited works

by some of the established members...

Nash contributed a new canvas...

..and said he wanted the work of the group

to express a truly contemporary spirit.

But a year after its founding, Unit One broke up.

Surrealism had become part of Nash's "adventure",

as he called his life.

It spoke to his passion for the mysterious and spiritual.

But what he did with it was so personal

that he can't really be pigeonholed as a Surrealist.

He was simply Paul Nash.

In 1933 Nash made a trip to Avebury in Wiltshire

where he visited the 4,000-year-old Neolithic site.

He was captivated by its mystery and antiquity.

He talked in a letter to Margaret of how happy he was in his new world.

At this time Nash had begun to suffer with chronic,

and sometimes life-threatening, asthma.

Avebury, which he discovered one hot, dry summer,

gave Nash joy, as he found he could breathe amongst these mysterious stones.

Nobody knows exactly what they are, these great standing stones

at Avebury, planted in the landscape like jagged teeth.

Are they ancient remains of druidic rituals?

Prehistoric tomb markers?

It's a mystery, but I think that's exactly what drew Paul Nash to them.

He could make of these forms what he liked.

In his mind they became ghosts.

He imagined them actually moving through the landscape when no-one was watching.

He was fascinated by their textures, their surfaces,

encrusted by time and nature with these shapes, these patterns,

these marks of lichen growth and by their wonderfully suggestive forms.

He needed something new, he needed to be reinvigorated

and I think it was the sheer alienness, the foreignness,

the weirdness of these forms that inspired him.

They gave him a new language,

a way of creating his own monuments to his own experience.

Nash took the shapes and forms of the Avebury monoliths and made them

part of his own teasing pictorial code,

transformed them into his ciphers, his hieroglyphs.

These stones of ancient origin and ritual significance became,

for him, the carriers of other, perhaps more personal, meanings.

The stone seems to me to have mutated into a shape

very much like a human torso,

and a rather battered one at that.

It's headless, it's legless,

there's the curve of its behind

and there's the curve of the back,

and what's it made of?

The paint has a kind of violence about it that suggests

perhaps a bruised skin,

but in other places it seems more metallic, like rusting iron,

perhaps a memory of the corrugated fencing of the trenches.

Some of these shapes might almost evoke mortars or shell holes.

So, to me, it looks very much like a shattered body,

shaped somehow by conflict.

So from an image of peace, tranquillity,

of spellbinding ancient civilisation, he's created

a modern image, an image of his own sense of dislocation,

of violence, of the destiny of man perhaps in the 20th century.

This brooding, broken body.

From the ghost of the ancient past he's created

an image that suggests the ghosts of war.

At about this time Margaret gave Nash a box camera.

And he began to photograph everything he could.

Using his new toy like a Surrealist's notebook,

he captured images as aides-memoire,

inspirations for later work.

And in 1935 Nash found himself in a place

especially rich in such images,

a place which, he said, with its "beauty, ugliness

"and power to disquiet,"

had a "natural surrealism".

The Dorset town of Swanage.

Ah, the joys of the English seaside in the rain!

This is Number 2 The Parade in Swanage, where Nash stayed.

This was his vantage point.

A little elevated wrought-iron balcony

from which you can see the sea wall,

the pier and the town beyond.

And what's wonderful about this is that very little has changed

since 1935 when Nash first came here.

So we can compare what he saw with what he painted

and when we do so, what's striking I think is

he talked about "unrealism",

or being a "seaside Surrealist".

When you compare the scene with what he made of it,

I think you can really see that, because

if I tried to take a photograph...

I have to be so... I mean, to frame it

the way that Nash painted it,

I have to go right in and I have to crop like mad,

and even then I can only just get a part of it

and I think when you realise how much he altered what he saw,

you get a sense of what he was after.

He was after essential form, essential rhythm,

the energy of the sea, the waves lapping over that great

protuberance at the end.

Now, what's behind the energy of these images?

I think part of the answer may lie in an encounter

that took place in 1935 just at the top of that hill,

in a hotel that's now no longer there.

In July of that year, in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel,

Nash and his wife were introduced to the beautiful young artist

Eileen Agar and her Hungarian husband to be, Joseph Bard.

Agar was a budding surrealist

and excited to meet Nash.

Together they went on long walks along the beach,

looking for found objects to include in their Surrealist experiments.

What resulted is some of Nash's most adventurous and unusual work.

In this collage, titled Swanage, we have a Nash-painted landscape

with Surrealist found objects in the foreground.

To the right, a large barnacled anchor, which Agar gave to Nash.

Their relationship, though, was not restricted to work.

Eileen was very attractive, she was very beautiful,

and very flirtatious, I think.

There was an immediate attraction on his part.

On her part, I'm not quite so sure.

I think she was more impressed by the fact that

he already had a name, she didn't.

He was... Since the First World War

and his paintings from the First World War,

he had quite a name in the London art world and she didn't then.

And I think that was perhaps what attracted her initially.

What do we know about Nash's health because I have the sense that

when he met her his health was already turning bad

and that there's a sense in which his relationship with Eileen

is almost like an injection of adrenaline,

it's something that gets him going again.

Oh, I couldn't agree more.

I mean, I think... You know, if you fall in love,

you have a creative energy, don't you?

And there's no doubt at all that he had this in a way that

perhaps he'd never had before.

The amount of paintings, about 80 in the year,

it really was only just over a year that he was here.

So there's no doubt at all in my mind

that it was a very creative partnership.

Later on he wrote to her that Margaret, his wife, said,

"Oh, Eileen only wants you for sex."

And in her book she says, huh! That's not likely, just look at him,

how he was, sick and quite ill all the time,

compared to Joseph, who was a very masculine, sort of hairy man! Yes.

So you think that Nash was genuinely in a love affair as well as...

Oh, yes, I do. I do.

Nash expressed his feelings for Agar in numerous letters.

Some of his correspondence with her is still preserved today

in the Tate Archive in London.

This really is a very poignant gathering of material,

a portrait of an affair, in fragments, glimpse and snatches.

This is beautiful.

A piece of brown Braille paper -

he'd write on anything he'd get his hands on -

and he's drawn this beautiful picture of Eileen

wearing rather risque underwear, look at her -

stockings, no suspenders, just tied with a ribbon,

and she's got a choker around her neck as well.

He's besotted with her at this point.

"My chaffinch,

"I can never get off my letters and presents in time.

"You know, so you won't be surprised that this latecomer

"bears my love and good wishes. Three little snakes for you,

"the practicable one you will wear, of course."

I wonder what he means by that.

Then there's this...

..it's actually an illustration for Thomas Browne's Urn Burial.

It's a hand-coloured lithograph but he's dedicated it

to Eileen and it's full of the imagery that she loved,

jellyfishes hovering through the air. There's one,

perhaps a symbolic representation of her husband

as she floats wide-eyed through space,

a figure seems to be falling down the stairs.

It's a dream image of what, for Nash,

seemed like a dream relationship.

And by the time he sends this postcard...

..the affair has become slightly off/on.

He is addressing it...

He remains with his wife, she remains with her husband.

He's addressing it to her under her married name.

Mrs Joseph Bard.

And he begins the postcard with a reference to her husband.

"When I was looking for Joseph's birthday card

"I was astonished by this. Don't you think it's rather fine?

"Oddly alive, as if it might speak."

-And...

-HE COUGHS SUGGESTIVELY

..that's the image itself that he's sent to her.

I think Sigmund Freud might have had SOMETHING to say about that.

During her affair Agar visited the South of France

with some of the famous members of Surrealism,

including Picasso,

Man Ray, and the poet Paul Eluard.

Nash discovered that Agar had had a relationship with the married Eluard.

Nash angrily challenged Agar and she tried to break things off with Nash.

Nash, though, tried to dissuade her.

He didn't want to lose his chaffinch.

In a letter he wrote,

"If we break now we break at the peak of our flight,

"where we had climbed like two birds who make love in midair,

"heedless of where they soar.

"We have not yet taken down our bright sky."

But she'd already begun to move away from him.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939,

Nash found a renewed patriotism.

He wrote of his desire to use his art and imagination as a weapon to beat the Nazis.

Nash was appointed a war artist for the second time in his life,

and the War Artists' Advisory Committee considered

Nash's visionary work to suit him for the Air Ministry.

Nash himself was desperate to fly.

He'd moved with his ever-supportive wife Margaret to Oxford,

where he'd watch Allied bombers group in the skies above.

Nash had loved the idea of flight since childhood.

His autobiography opens with the rapturous description

of a recurring boyhood dream

of being able to fly or somehow levitate.

"A spring from the ground would carry me up and onward,

"twirling at times like a leaf on the still air,

"but always able just sufficiently to steer course.

"All my life I've enjoyed this mysterious exciting experience.

"No other adventure of sleep is so disappointing to wake from.

"For, while indulged in,

"it has a compelling reality like no other fantasy."

In one of his most ambitious paintings of the Second World War,

Battle Of Britain,

you can sense Nash's love of flight, tempered by abhorrence.

He shows planes looping and circling as they engage in combat.

The wildness of their movements

preserved in the traces of their passage.

Their trails are like man-made clouds.

Parodies of the emanations of nature which ominously interrupt

the peace and tranquillity of a bright blue sky.

They've scarred the very air with their fumes and machine-gun fire,

just as the shells of the First World War

had churned up the fields of Flanders.

A single doomed plane is shown about to crash.

Falling from air to earth.

Its pilot about to meet a lonely Icarus death.

Nash may have wanted to join battle with the Nazis himself

but he couldn't fly,

not even an observation plane.

Due to his respiratory problems Nash never did make it up into the sky.

Instead he depicted crashed enemy bombers

decaying in the landscape.

Images of loss and failure.

His asthma worsened

and Margaret became a full-time nurse to him.

He still wrote to Agar,

but their relationship was spiralling down.

This letter, written on -

I won't pick it up because it's very, very fragile -

written on grey notepaper

in red pencil that's so faint that you can now barely read it,

you can just make out the odd word,

but luckily for us when it was bequeathed to the Tate Archive

one of the archivists here transcribed what could be read

at that point and typed it out, so we've got this.

"May I ask just what all this is about?"

It's an angry letter, Nash to Eileen.

"I find now that you are still in Earl's Court

"where I presumed you might be when I wrote and that you're NOT ill."

She's been giving him the run-around.

"So why don't you behave?

"Don't tell me Joseph occupies the whole of your world,

"or is it contracting for other reasons?

"You are so lucky to be living in London,

"able to see so many people and share so many other lives.

"Remember I live for weeks without meeting either friends or new faces.

"The few, the very few I love are infinitely precious.

"You have always been someone I can't lose."

When Eileen received the letter,

she tore it up.

She later stuck it back together again but...

..this marks the end of the affair.

Afterwards Nash threw himself into his work.

He repeatedly visited the aircraft dump

of enemy planes in Cowley, Oxfordshire.

Here, in the only existing footage of Paul Nash,

you see him carrying out the preparatory sketches

for one of his true masterpieces.

A painting he gave the German title Totes Meer.

Dead Sea.

Nash hated Hitler,

the "failure artist" he called him.

He detested Nazism

and I think by depicting this great sea

of wrecked Luftwaffe fuselage

and aircraft

he is intending to suggest

that the great tide of Nazi invasion

that had laid waste to Europe

is now finally at the ebb, it's on the way out.

I think it's suffused with a kind of melancholy that's unavoidable.

It's strange, it's weird, it is dreamlike.

That landscape that lies beyond

the wave of wrecked metal

has an utterly haunting quality to it,

it draws you in to its vertiginous distance.

The owl,

symbol of Minerva, symbol of wisdom,

hovering over the wrecked aircraft.

And I wonder if there aren't elements of Nash's own

melancholy embedded within it.

It's about something that was flying

that's fallen.

That's been wrecked.

Could it also be an allegory of his love for Eileen Agar?

The great love of his life, which is now finally utterly over.

Could there be elements of reference perhaps to

his own personal predicament?

He is increasingly ill, his asthma is getting worse and worse.

He can barely breathe.

Does he sense that...

Paul Nash has identified himself so often with a bird in flight,

does he now feel that his own path is downward...

..towards something like this cemetery

formed from tangled, broken wings?

It's a beautiful picture, and I suspect a very personal one.

In 1942, with the war still raging,

Nash escaped once more to nature.

With aggressive asthma, he began a series of paintings

of the place where his adventure had started.

The Wittenham Clumps.

So, tell me about Nash's approach to the Clumps late in life?

He went to visit the house of a friend in Boars Hill,

which is just about eight miles

over there in the distance,

and he found there was a good view of the Clumps from inside the house.

He was suffering with asthma so he wasn't a well man,

he wasn't able to get out and about as much as he would have liked

but he was able to view the Clumps through binoculars

and he used them to create

a whole new series of paintings of the Wittenham Clumps.

His early representations of the Clumps are very neat and precise,

every last detail is recorded,

but when he gets to Boars Hill

suddenly his imagination soars

and he paints these wonderful oils full of mystery and atmosphere

and he described the Clumps as having a compelling magic for him.

And he used to add what he felt was right in the foreground.

He once said, "I don't bother what grows where very much,

"I find things grow where I paint them."

And I think that's a lovely way of describing

how he set about just making these scenes for himself.

So one thing that you really feel when you're up here

is you just feel how much air there is, how much wind,

how much breeze, how much sky.

I can't help wondering if Nash, poor old Nash,

down there with his binoculars, wasn't looking up to the Clumps,

almost trying to draw that air into his lungs by painting.

He wrote that he could feel himself making his first drawings again.

He thought that they were some of the best drawings he ever made

and that excitement came back to him

as he recalled the first time he came here.

Mm.

So it's almost a form of rejuvenation to return.

-Very definitely.

-At the end. To become young again.

-Yes.

Wittenham had given Nash so much as a young man

and now it gave him space for his imagination

as his frail body, wracked by asthma, declined.

I think there's something very moving about Paul Nash's last years

here, close to the Wittenham Clumps.

He knows his body's giving out on him,

he's like one of those aeroplanes,

grounded aeroplanes that he'd painted in Totes Meer.

His time is nearly up.

And yet, he responds with this tremendous surge of energy,

painting this landscape, which meant so much to him,

again and again.

Of course the scene itself in 1943, 1944, was nothing like it is now.

This was, in effect, part of the theatre of war.

The whole area was fenced off like a military installation,

and on the nights of the great bombing raids

up to 800 planes would gather in formation in the skies

directly above the Clumps, from the American airbase over there

and the RAF airbase over there, before flying off to wreak havoc.

Yet, in Paul Nash's paintings, there is no trace of that.

Yes, there is unease, there's turbulence,

shafts of light that seem almost like search beams.

But in other pictures there's a tremendous sense of

tranquillity and hope -

religious symbols appear for the first time in his work.

The lily, symbol of the Virgin Mary,

the sunflower, emblem of the soul that turns always to face God.

There's a softness and a lightness in the palette.

It's as if he's painting an Eden of the imagination,

some kind of paradise to which he hopes he will return.

To which he hopes he will be transported

by the inevitable fact of his own death.

There's the sense that he's getting ready to meet his maker.

They're among the last paintings he ever created.

Solstice Of The Sunflower, 1945,

is one of Nash's final paintings.

In the background are his Wittenham Clumps,

bathed in the solstice sun.

Centre stage, a sunflower,

almost floating.

Nash said he saw the sunflower like a wheel of fire,

but with its open form and trail of cords

tying it to the sun it also resembles a parachute.

Nash had been haunted by fears of a parachute invasion of Britain

during the Second World War.

But was also fascinated by their movements.

He called them aerial flowers.

Nash was very frightened of death

but told a friend he was able to face the end of his life

by persuading himself that it was, "akin to flowers

"aerially borne, a kind of eternity of fragrant and gentle drifting."

So is the sunflower parachute perhaps Nash's vision

of himself gently drifting into the hereafter?

On 11 July 1946, Paul Nash died in his sleep in Boscombe,

a seaside resort, on a trip back to his beloved Dorset.

Margaret followed his final wishes

and Nash is buried near the family home in Iver Heath.

Back close to the Bird Garden and trees that began his life and work.

Close to the landscapes that inspired Nash

to become one of Britain's great landscape painters.

Nash remained enigmatic to the end.

A strange birdlike creature,

perhaps from one of his paintings, perches on his grave.

Is it guarding him?

Is it haunting him?

Nash had worked magic with the materials given to him,

harsh experience, an uneasy mind and a frail body.

And he had always been haunted,

haunted by life,

by death

and by the ghosts of war.