1936

In the Autumn of 1934: Whitecliff in Swanage Bay is again offered as a retreat. Nash recalls the relief to his intermittently poor health “We are lent a house by the sea. Blessed escape. Enchantment of the Ballard.”

Paul and Margaret had spent the first six months of 1934 touring France, Gibraltar, Spain and Africa in the hope of finding a hospitable climate for Paul’s ailing health. Although the weather was indifferent and brought little relief in his underlying condition, he met many of the leading artists of the avant-garde – Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso – as well as several of the Surrealists.

Familiar with the Modern movements emanating out of continental Europe, Paul’s artistic interests remained wide and varied, and he experimented with abstraction, constructivism, and surrealism. He was drawn to the visual language and iconography of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, influences that would work their way into his imagery and compositions in the years ahead.

Collegiate and sociable, Paul was drawn to several artist’s groups and assumed a leadership role in creating Unit One, intended to bring together like-minded artists, architects and writers keen to articulate a collective vision of English modernism. He and sculptor Henry Moore met often, energised by an ambition to put ‘new life and impetus’ into the disparate strands of contemporary creative practice that were then appearing across Britain.

Unit One embraced the two dominant currents – abstraction and Surrealism - in modern art, currents that Nash himself embraced in unequal measure through the decade. Paul announced the launch of the group in a letter to The Times newspaper (12 June 1933) asserting boldly that the grouping was intended ‘to stand for the expression of a truly contemporary spirit, for that thing which is recognised as peculiarly of today in painting, sculpture and architecture’. (Paul Nash, The Times, published 13 June 1933)

Their first and only group exhibition was held in 1934, accompanied by a book, Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. With an introduction by the influential critic and poet Herbert Read it consisted of statements by all those in the group – amongst them Edward Burra, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore – along with photographs of their work. (Herbert Read (ed.) Unit One: the modern movement in English architecture, painting and sculpture. London: Cassell, 1934)

Despite its brief period of activity, the group was an important marker for English modernism and established London as a centre for critical debate and artistic practices. For Paul Nash it helped crystallise the directions he needed to take as he picked his way through the polarising debates of the day:

“I feel now I am beginning to find my way between the claims of ‘Abstractions’ and pure interpretation. As you know, I am far too interested in the character of landscape and natural forms generally - from a pictorial point of view – ever to abandon painting Nature of some kind or other. But I want a wider aspect, a different angle of vision as it were.” (Paul Nash to Anthony Bertram, 14 April 1934)

After their extended tour of Europe, the Nashes returned to a cottage in Owley near Romney Heath, but it proved too damp for Paul’s asthmatic condition and they sought a more hospitable location.

In the Autumn of 1934, Hilda Felce offered them Whitecliff as an extended retreat while she and her husband, Gilbert, were overseas. The Nash’s spent five months, from October 1934 until February 1935 in the large stone building overlooking Swanage Bay. In a letter to his friend and fellow war veteran, Lance Sieveking, Paul expressed his relief at being offered such a home, however temporary:

“This is a very comfortable and soigne and generally delectable house and grounds we’ve been lent just under the downs and blinking at the sea. I have a good room to work in and am at last getting some new work done and feeling a lot better as well.” (Paul Nash to Lance Sieveking, 4 November 1934)

In Outline, his autobiographical writings (p.225) he wrote summarily, but with profound appreciation: “We are lent a house by the sea. Blessed escape. Enchantment of the Ballard.”

Artworks 1934

'Event on the Downs'

'Event on the Downs' ranks as one of Paul Nash’s major pictorial statements of the decade. Outwardly, it describes a view from Whitecliff Farm looking across rolling fields toward Ballard Down and the white cliffs that lead to Old Harry Rock and the Pinnacle.

However, it is far more than a topographical landscape. Instead, three motifs are displayed in an incongruous but compelling conversation with one another: a rootless tree-stump, a rounded, but solid white cloud, and a tennis ball, its curves echoing the undulations of the fields beyond. In their mute relationship with each other, Nash devised a compositional ploy that presaged others he was to conjure in his travels between the Purbeck coast, the megaliths at Avebury and the conical mound of Silbury Hill.

Perplexing yet entirely credible, disquieting but also domesticated, ‘Event on the Downs’ was certainly set in and stimulated by the Purbeck coast but owes its origins to the still-life photographs that Nash concocted during the decade, many made from objects gathered on Dorset’s coasts and downs, and then arranged with unerring precision on boards, table-tops, even on the back of a car. Photographed with his new No.A1 Pocket Kodak often under raking sunlight, Nash revealed a parallel environment through this ‘new eye’, an arena where a stump of wood might encounter a soft spherical object, a sensuous flint nestling alongside a hard-edge geometric block.

'Event on the Downs' melded these uncanny arrangements into a scene of disquieting familiarity. Calmly and without undue melodrama, Nash offers us a vista that is reassuringly memorable, a place where he has walked, a place we too might know well. Then, through the unfussy arrangement of fantastic elements he disrupts our senses. Yet, as Andrew Causey observes, it is achieved with a studied consideration for visual reality, which prevents us from being overwhelmed and wholly disorientated.

It was a technique of assimilation that Nash learned and adapted from Rene Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist whose ‘temperate insouciance’ and disjunctive designs had most affected him. (See Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, p.286-87) However, where Magritte premised discordance dressed in bourgeois banality, Nash preferred a more graded exposition of ideas and forms, invariably held in check by a cool, muted palette and a unifying fall of light.

In this memorable canvas, the title indicates that we are part of much more than a wistful arrangement of discordant objects in a rural setting: we are witnesses to an encounter as dramatic as anything in Magritte. Much has been written of Nash’s fixations with death and as he designed this composition, he had been preoccupied with mortality since the death of his father five years earlier in 1929.

Nash had also shown an interest at that time in Chinese art and philosophy. In one reading of this painting, the tennis ball might be understood as an equivalent for the yin-yang symbol:

The black (active, masculine) part, subtly indicated here by a shadow, is thought to activate the body in life along with the white (passive, feminine) part. At the point of death, the two are thought to separate. The masculine element rises into the sky, represented here by the cloud, while the feminine element sinks into the earth, represented by the tree stump, a romantic symbol of death. (Mary Beal, 'Paul Nash's "Event on the Downs" reconsidered', Burlington Magazine, November 1989).

Seen through this lens, the tree stump and the cloud echo each other in shape, the cloud assuming the solidity of the cliff directly beneath it, the pair of forms complimenting each other in exquisite counterpoise.

Event on the Downs

1934

oil on canvas

H 51 x W 61 cm

Government Art Collection, accession number 8536

Purchased from the Leicester Galleries, 1969