PAUL NASH: MODERN ARTIST, ANCIENT LANDSCAPE

MONTAGU, Jemima, Andrew Causey, Sam Smiles, Simon Grant

ISBN 10: 1854374737 / ISBN 13: 9781854374738

Published by Tate Publishing, London, 2003

About this Item

4to. pp 127, [1]. Colour illustrated soft covers. Illustrated throughout in colour. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool, 23 July - 19 October 2003.ISBN: 1854374680 Very good indeed.

Seller Inventory # C66273

Bibliographic Details

• Title: PAUL NASH: MODERN ARTIST, ANCIENT LANDSCAPE
• Publisher: Tate Publishing, London
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1854374737
• ISBN 13: 9781854374738
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis

DESCRIPTIONPaul Nash was born in London in 1889, the son of a successful lawyer. Influenced by the work of William Blake and contemporary Stanley Spencer, Nash held shows in 1912 and 1913 before joining the Artists' Rifles upon the outbreak of World War I. It was as a result of his harrowing experience in the trenches that his work developed from early imaginary landscapes to the harsh world of tragedy and triumph that he experienced on the Western Front. The essays in the book examine the dominant themes evident throughout Nash's career--decay, death and renewal, and cycles of nature--and place them in the context of "British" national sensibility during the interwar years. They also discuss the tension between the artist's increasing fascination with heritage, prehistoric cultures and primitive forms, and the invocation of the modern through industrialization, technology, and the machine aesthetic. This book reveals Nash as a painter who looked both back to the humanist English landscape tradition and forward to the technological age.

Review

Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo