Paul Nash: Landscape and the Life of Objects

Description

Paul Nash (1889-1946) created an individual pathway through English art in the first half of the 20th century, shaping a body of work that recognised the importance of the modern movement and stimulated him to evolve his own English landscape-based Surrealism. Within a narrative that is both chronological and thematic, Andrew Causey, the leading authority on Paul Nash, teases out the character of Nash's vision and unravels his personal mythology.Nash's values link him to Romanticism, in an art that is deeply imbued with personal feeling, in which elements of landscape merge with individual identity and a sense of the essential nature of England itself. While evidence of this is drawn principally from Nash's painting, Andrew Causey also stresses the revealing nature of Nash's writings and the importance of the artist's book illustration. Building on the author's pioneering catalogue raisonne on the artist, this publication sets Nash's vision in the wider cultural context of literature and poetry, and takes new scholarship into account.Including 100 colour images, Paul Nash combines up-to-date scholarship with the best of Nash's paintings and is an invaluable addition to the literature on an artist whose centrality to English art is increasingly recognised.

Andrew Causey wrote extensively on 20th-century art and was the author of Paul Nash: Critical Study and Catalogue Raisonne and books on Edward Burra and Peter Lanyon. He contributed to exhibition catalogues on Stanley Spencer, Andy Goldsworthy and other artists. He selected works for exhibitions in Britain and abroad, including British Art in the Twentieth Century at the Royal Academy in 1987 and was Emeritus Professor of the History of Modern Art at Manchester University.

It is an authoritative and reliable survey of an artist always deserving of close attention.'Roger Cardinal, The Burlington Magazine The book upholds the standards of Lund Humphries series on modern British artists, with high production values and good illustrations, which bring obscure works to light without neglecting famous pieces. British Art Journal, Jan 2015