Bob Dylan: Inspiration and identity

Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways is a late masterpiece with the opening track I Contain Multitudes providing one key - no doubt broken off - to its preoccupations.

I Contain Multitudes concerns human complexity; our changeability, our contradictions, the long and winding roads of our life experiences, and the cultural references into which we were born and which we absorbed as we developed. In these respects, each of us contain multitudes as we are the sum of our parts.

Several of the tracks on Rough and Rowdy Ways, including Mother of Muses and Murder Most Foul, are list songs or part-list songs where the lists are primarily those of cultural references. In Murder Most Foul the latter half of the song is a lengthy list of artists that the protagonist wants to see featuring in Wolfman Jack's radio show. Among the multitudes we each contain, listening to the music that Wolfman Jack plays in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy may be a means of escaping from the foul nature of reality or the way in which those who have grown up with popular culture process emotion or both together in tension. In Mother of Muses we are told that the source of artistic inspiration and identity is to be found in the songs and stories of those who have gone before. The artist is one with a mind that roams our cultural heritage until death brings rest from such cultural rambling. As Dylan said in 2012 'I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple ... It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.'

Dylan emerged into public consciousness as one appropriating the folk tradition within which the 'borrowing of ideas has always been an integral part.' That occurs through the sense of a tradition from which musicians take and adapt, 'giving their work added depth and imbuing it with a sense of timelessness.'

The phrase that has come to sum up this approach is 'Good artists copy; great artists steal.' This is an aphorism that seems to have reversed what may have been its original use in an article by W. H. Davenport Adams published in 1892. The reversal being made by T. S. Eliot in an essay published in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

In The Waste Land Eliot used fragments of literature drawn from across tradition to map out the place of "stony rubbish" and of:

'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water'

which is the waste land.

The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to 'shore up' fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the Golden Bough, Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.

The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: 'as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth'.

Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as 'the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty'.

This is the source of the added depth and sense of timelessness found in the folk tradition but it is, as Eliot, argues what all great artists do. Dylan clearly agrees but notes too that this is the means by which we all construct our identity; in a way that makes us the sum of our parts because we all contain multitudes. In this sense we are all artists. Most of us, though, are simply good artists as we primarily and relatively unconsciously copy the ideas of others rather than doing what the great artists do, which is to appropriate ideas that are in the cultural commons for their own ends.

In Greek myth the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne (Memory), who is said to know everything, past, present, and future. Memory is the basis of all life and creativity, as Eliot and Dylan also argue. They want us to recover what used to be in our collective memory so the muses can forge our identity 'from the inside out'.Similarly, forgetting the true order and origin of things is often tantamount to death. That dilemma - what it means to be or not to be - is addressed by Dylan in My Own Version Of You where the protagonist attempts to shape the life of another rather than his own; a wrong remembering and a distraction from our true task.

Ross Horton notes that 'Bob Dylan appears, with each passing year, to have digested more of the very fabric of human history than any prophet or sage before him.' Dylan is returning the culture he absorbed as a child and young adult to our collective memory lest we lose it. He is using epic poetry in order to do so, which is why he's falling for Calliope. He wants us to drink deeply from the river of memory.  

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Bob Dylan - Mother Of Muses. 

St Peter De Beauvoir Town - Memory Installation

St Peter De Beauvoir Town is a place of worship and prayer, with services and spaces to help parishioners and visitors on their life journey. They are deeply rooted in the neighbourhood of De Beauvoir, and host a wealth of community activity in their newly renovated crypt.

This Easter, artist Angela Wright created 'an installation for the church which was made in conjunction with four workshops using 'Memory' as their theme.' 'It presents objects lent by Angela and church attendees.' 'This offered the church a valuable opportunity for outreach to older people and dementia support networks. The installation provided a backdrop to a Lent programme of Holy Conversations – stories of St Peter’s and stories of God: stories of grace and well-being, scarcity and abundance, grief and change.'

'Her addition hardly changes the building environment - adding a vague complexity at the margins of sight - diverging from the chancel as if scattering fragments of its windows' colours into the body of the church. When however one approaches a wall, miscellaneous objects, trapped and flaunted in a turbulent stream of wire, become increasingly recognisable as a detritus of ordinary manufactured and naturally formed things. One's curiosity is aroused and one's attention focuses a single object, which stripped of its context of familiarity - of use and meaning that is extraneous to actuality - is awarded uniqueness and we see it as bizarre: a thing manifesting complex characteristics that are relatively undiluted by perceptions of its 'place and purpose in the world'.'

Angela has said: “Before I started to attach them I laid out all of the memorable objects on tables and they became my palette. I needed to become familiar with them. Their shapes, their colours, history and how they might live together. Finding that special resting place on the wall was not simple and it could take time, sometimes days and a small percentage of objects were rejected. The placing and space around each object was an important aspect of the installation. In the end around 430 objects were incorporated. In the final week, knitting needles were employed to help direct the sense of movement around the building. Balls of wool picking up the colours of the stained glass were used to draw the eye to the unity of the building.”

'The appreciation of the piece grows by the week as people slowly take it in. At first glance you might think it was a display of leftover Christmas decorations – many of the objects are suspended and catch the changing light in the building. As you draw closer you see that each object has its own space, its own voice and viewing becomes an act of contemplation.'

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The Innocence Mission - Evensong.

States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness

I enjoyed visiting the Wellcome Collection today to see 'States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness'. This exhibition examines perspectives from artists, psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience.

Exploring phenomena such as somnambulism, synaesthesia, and disorders of memory and consciousness, the exhibition examines ideas around the nature of consciousness, and in particular what can happen when our typical conscious experience is interrupted, damaged or undermined.

The States of Mind exhibition enables visitors to explore some of the ideas about the nature of consciousness and, in particular, what happens at the ‘edges of consciousness’, when our typical conscious, or unconscious, experience is disrupted or damaged. The exhibition is organised into four areas, each of which explores a different theme related to consciousness: Science & Soul, Sleep & Awake, Language & Memory, Being & Not Being. Each area features objects, artworks and films, exploring the ideas and work of artists, philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists.

'States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness' has featured a series of changing installations. The final one is 'Time Present' by Shona Ilingsworth, from 19 July until 16 October. This powerful installation considers the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory.

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Sons of Maxwell - The Lighthouse.

Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy

Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph. Jan Vanriet, like Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas, among others, often uses photographs as source material for his paintings. The Music Boy is a quadripytch based on a photograph of Vanriet's Grandmother and Uncle prior to the Second World War. Vanriet paints the same innocent image - a mother and child, folk music in a family setting - four times in varying degrees of detail and focus, as well as different colour combinations. These different renditions of the same image serve to engender a variety of emotional responses to an autobiographical image which is in some sense universalized through its varied repetition.

Repetition of the image also brings an element of uncertainty to a seemingly innocent image laden with a multiplicity of artistic and literary associations. Use of different degrees of focus and detail - the image fading in and out of focus - raise questions of memory in family and oral histories together with issues of endurance both personally - Vanriet's Uncle died of tuberculosis developed in Dachau - and in terms of the media we use to tell our stories and retain our images - in this cases images based on a photograph (a medium with built-in fade and frailty).

Vanriet repeats the trick in The Contract, a polyptych of the artist’s parents together on the dance floor having survived a concentration camp. He draws out the combination of happiness and hope with suffering and grief which is contained in this image and its history through the variation in his treatment of it. Focusing on particular details, changing backgrounds and colours, using silhouettes and patterns, he evokes nuances and perspectives of memory and consequence. Mauthausen, the concentration camp in Austria where his parents first met, is referenced by a panel where the couple’s feet are superimposed on a red triangle, the badge worn by political prisoners in the camps. The combined effect of the eleven panels is to evoke and explore the nature of the contract entered into by this traumatized yet freed couple.

Vanriet is “a pivotal figure in the world of contemporary narrative painting” (Jan Vanriet, The Music Boy Press Release - http://www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/info/press/press-releases). Narrative, however, has been a major 'no, no' in much modern art. As a reaction against historical, mythical and religious painting, the literary and the linear were anathematized. As a painter who is also a poet and who collaborates with his novelist wife, Simone Lenaerts, Vanriet is clearly a counter-reaction to this anathematization of narrative in modern art. However, in his art, this not primarily expressed in terms of the linear and literary.

Modernist narratives are multi-layered with contradictory voices creating polyphony. That phrase from a musical concept is relevant to the diversity of voices found in many modernist novels and to the multiple panels of works like The Music Boy and The Contract. Simultaneity, contradiction, polyphonic fragmentation, paradox; these are modernist techniques revealing transcendental negativity; that is, what cannot be spoken and the existence of worlds beyond limits. This world of contemporary narrative painting, inhabited by Vanriet, Richter, Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others, is one in which “events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details” (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/luc-tuymans); a world of modernist narratives visualised.

Vanriet’s contribution to this world is an art which makes significant reference to autobiography, history and memory as they feature in the mythical, political and religious stories we tell. Lenaerts is also closely involved and both create using Vanriet’s family history including that of the Uncle who was arrested in Antwerp and transported to Dachau; a “descent into hell which he, once back home, wrote down with his last remaining strength as his life flickered out silently on the flowered sofa, in his mother's arms.” (S. Lenaerts, ‘A Scrap of Time’ in De Morgan, July 2012 - http://www.citybooks.eu/en/cities/citybooks/p/detail/a-scrap-of-time)

Martin Herbert writes that Vanriet’s work reveals “a world that glimmers with significance” but, in which, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, we cannot “connect signifier and signified.” We can’t “hold onto the past for lessons,” as we are fragile, “as fragile and fallible as our memories” (M. Herbert, ‘Hide and Seek’ in Jan Vanriet: The Music Boy, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2016).

This sense is, perhaps, most clear in Vanriet’s Horse series. These paintings update The Contract by featuring a husband and wife - Vanriet and Lenaerts - together in a shared activity; in this case, that of playing a pantomime horse. However, Vanriet removes the costume that would make comic sense of their shared activity leaving just the awkwardness of their unusual posture in settings which reference Edvard Munch’s Moonlight or Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto. Vanriet and Lenaerts play out their shared activity in a role and settings which no longer make sense.

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James Horner - Remembrance, Remembrance.

The whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances

Last Sunday The Observer published an interview with Neil MacGregor in which he made what seem to me to be some of the most pertinent observations that I have heard to date on the issues surrounding the EU referendum and the possibility of Brexit. In the interview he talks about acts of memory as a defining difference within Europe:

'In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”

Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?

“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”

And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”

Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”

The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes

That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.

“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”

The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”

The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”'

This, it seems to me, explains, in part, the shortcomings of the argument currently being made by anti-EU campaigners that Barack Obama is guilty of double standards when he encourages the UK to remain part of the EU. What those campaigners fail to acknowledge is that the USA is, as it says on the tin, a Union of States. Obama recognises the importance of cooperation rather than isolation and interdependence rather than independence because that is built in to the existence of America, part of its raison d'être. By contrast, the anti-EU campaigners believe, as McGregor notes, that we should entirely do these things on our own and try to assume total control over our environment. In my view it is this refusal to recognise the value of cooperation and interdependence that causes the shallowness in the arguments made in favour of Brexit.

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Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land.

Discover & explore: Bereavement (All Souls)

St Stephen Walbrook held a special Discover & explore service for All Souls today. This service explored aspects of bereavement with readings, music, prayers and reflection. The Choir of St Stephen Walbrook and the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields joined together to sing pieces from Fauré's Requiem and the service ended with an opportunity to light candles in memory of loved ones. Here is the reflection that I shared during this service:

Psalm 23 is a picture of life. Our lives contain both times of refreshment and joy – those times by the still waters and in the green pastures – and times of trial and loss – as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. These times of joy and times of trial are our common experience of life. But this Psalm says more. It says that God is with us in all of these experiences. He leads us beside the still waters and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. He can do this because in Jesus he has experienced human life for himself. God understands and will be alongside us in our grief.

How can that be, particularly when grief involves a whole mix of different emotions at different times – anger, sadness, love, guilt and numbness – which mean that it is a very individual experience? All we can really do, as a result, is to share our experiences of how it has been for us. That is what Alfred Lord Tennyson did in his poem ‘In Memoriam’, a sequence of lyric poems written over a 17 year period which comprise a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. Tennyson then wrote memorably again on the subject of death in ‘Crossing the Bar’ after he had survived a serious illness. Shortly before he died, Tennyson told his son whom he had tellingly named Hallam to "put 'Crossing the Bar' at the end of all editions of my poems". Just as Tennyson memorably shared his experience of God with him in his grief, I would like to do the same.

My younger brother, Nick Evens, died on 11th November 1999 in a plane crash in Kosovo. He was on a UN commissioned plane taking relief workers into Kosovo to work on reconstructing the country following the conflict there. Nick was part of Tearfund’s Disaster Response Team. He had been in Kosovo working with Kosovan villagers to rebuild homes, had returned home for a short break, and was returning to continue work on the rebuilding programme.

The plane went off course as it neared Pristina Airport and crashed in nearby mountains. I remember taking a phone call from my parents who had been notified that contact had been lost with the plane and feeling absolutely unable to accept or comprehend the news. This was something that simply could not be happening.

My father and I were flown to Rome by Tearfund to wait for news together with the families of the other 23 people who died in the crash. After a few days we were flown to Kosovo to see the crash site for ourselves. On arrival at Pristina Airport we were loaded into helicopters and flown the short distance into the mountains and over the site of the wreckage. This was the worst moment for each one of us. As we saw the small pieces of the plane strewn over the mountainside we knew exactly what had happened to our loved ones and were faced full-on with the reality of their death.

When we returned to Pristina Airport, some refreshments had been organised for us in a tent and members of Tearfund who had worked with Nick had travelled to the Airport to be with us. We sat and listened as they told us about the effect that Nick had had on the Kosovan people with whom he had worked and also on other members of the team as they had valued his friendship, support and advice. As they talked, the tears flowed; theirs and ours and, I believe, God’s as he was with us at the time enabling us to express our grief. But, as they talked, I also had a growing sense that Nick had gone into God’s presence and had been welcomed with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In that moment I glimpsed something of the glory into which Nick had entered and that glimpse continues to sustain and strengthen me in my loss.

Over subsequent days, I heard many more stories of the way in which Nick’s life had influenced others and over the years since I had seen the way in which the inspiration he provided has led others to continue the work that he began. Young people whose lives were turned around through the youth project that Nick worked for have continued his youth work and his charitable work in Uganda while Nick’s involvement with Tearfund inspired another member of our family to join their Disaster Response Team. In these ways, the stories about Nick that begun to be told at Pristina Airport have continued to be told and in the telling my sense that God is alongside me in my grief and that Nick has been welcomed into glory has grown.

My experience of grief suggests that it is as we cry out in our grief that God meets with us. He is alongside us through his Spirit and will speak for us in groans that words cannot express. We should not be afraid of tears, of memories or of stories, as they are an expression of the love we feel. As we share our grief together we may catch a glimpse of the glory that waits to be revealed to us and into which our loved ones have entered and that glimpse can sustain us as we re-enter our everyday lives. In these and other ways God offers to lead us through the times of trial until we come to live with him forever.

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Gabriel Fauré - Libera Me.

Held in the divine memory

Here is the piece I wrote for this week's parish newsletter at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

During the recent Living with Dementia evening at St Martin-in-the-Fields several people expressed the hope that has been articulated well by scientist and priest, John Polkinghorne, that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

I was reminded by this of the parables Jesus told in which a sheep, a coin and a son, respectively, are lost. Each story ends with rejoicing over the finding again of that which was lost. These stories hold out the possibility that, in God, nothing is lost. Certainly, the importance to Jesus of that which was lost being found is emphasised by his choosing to tell three different stories on this same theme.

In the context of a condition like dementia in which memory is progressively lost, it could be a source of some hope that nothing is lost and that all we are and have been is held in the divine memory. If we are, in some sense, as Psalm 139 suggests, fearfully and wonderfully made by being formed or knit together by God in our mother’s womb; if our frame is not hidden from God when we were being made in secret, if God’s eyes beheld our unformed substance, and if all the days that have been formed for us were written in God’s book when none of them as yet existed, then it would follow beautifully and logically that those memories and knowledge would be retained in the divine memory for eternity. Maybe, as the saying goes, nothing lasts but nothing is lost.

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Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends Theme.

Living with Dementia

On Tuesday, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, we continued our exploration of the experience of dementia and faith, through the insight of lived experience and theological reflection, as we looked at how our church life and worship might grow in a more dementia-friendly way. We were helped enormously in doing so by Clive Wright, David Warbrick and Sister Margaret.

David Warbrick said: "I was seeing, pared down, the very fabric of faith: imagination, analogy, metaphor, improvisation, musicality of speech, the power of words to evoke rather than confine and control. In his dementia, Dad laid bare the workings of the equipment God has given human beings for prayer. Half an hour in his real-yet-imaginary world burnished my vision of the world outside. The slowness and sense of presence made me see the exquisite delicacy of facial expressions and listen to intonation as much as to words, so something shifted in me. Just as his paintings have made me stop and behold rather than merely look at the world, maybe in his childlike dementia he has offered me a gift of perception I need to receive precisely now if I am to stay in touch with the kingdom of heaven during this exciting, potentially fruitful but also perhaps dangerously self-important, busily distracted decade of my life."

Several people spoke a sense of hope as a result of the idea developed by John Polkinghorne that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

Also of particular interest was the thought that it is our earliest memories which are the last to fade. This is an additional reason for seeking to ensure that children have positive experiences in their childhood, as those memories may well be the place that they inhabit again at the end of their lives.

These are just some points of particular note for me from an evening which was full of value for those who came. Much discussion about dementia is to do with increasing understanding and thinking about the small things that we can do to make a difference to people affected by dementia in our community. That is deeply valuable but this evening took the discussion in very different directions which confronted some of the very real questions and challenges that the experience of living with dementia raises.

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R.E.M. - Talk About The Passion.

Small pebbles on the graves of the dead

Francine Mayran has been exhibiting her paintings and sculptures since 1999. Her artistic work of memory on the Holocaust has developed in parallel since 2008:

'She thinks that painting imposed itself as an imperative, to serve the transmission of an intransmissible genocide, the one of men, women and children, whose only crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy, or in 1915 Armenian, or in 1975 Cambodian or Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.

She says, as the American painter Samuel Bak, "I didn’t choose the Shoah, but the Shoah chose me to become one of its bearers of testimony".

Her aim is to connect photos and objective evidence of the past, and to link them through a personal pictorial creation, as in a line of descent, so that these images remain and live on and so that through painting, they become moments of the present.

She tries as a bearer of memory, to take over from the memory of the last direct witnesses, who little by little pass away.

Her creations also try to be echo of other memories, those of the Gypsies, those of the homosexuals, those of the resistants deported because of their ideas,as well as those of the handicapped persons.

As the artist says: “To speak, to write, to paint are small pebbles on the graves of the dead, words of support to survivors to allow them to leave their burden of guilt and responsibility and pass on their message.”'

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Yaakov Shwekel - Shema Yisroel.

Paul Nash: Truth and Memory

Andrew Graham Dixon gave a compelling portrait of Paul Nash in the first programme of the BBC series British Art at War. Graham Dixon argued that:

‘Nash was scarred by the war and the ghosts of those experiences haunted his work throughout his life. A lover of nature, Nash became one of Britain's most original landscape artists, embracing modern Surrealism and ancient British history, though always tainted by his experiences during two world wars. A private yet charismatic man, he brought British landscape painting into the 20th century with his mixture of the personal and visionary, the beautiful and the shocking. An artist who saw the landscape as not just a world to paint, but a way into his heart and mind.’

Nash’s work currently features in Truth and Memory at the Imperial War Museum; ‘the largest exhibition and first major retrospective of  British First World War art for almost 100 years.’ Using artworks drawn mainly from IWM’s national collection and including work by some of Britain’s most important artists of the twentieth century, this exhibition assesses ‘the immediate impact and enduring legacy of British art of the First World War.’

Truth explores ‘how artists encountering the front lines experimented with new forms of art to capture the totally unfamiliar experience of the First World War.’ Through the work of CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and William Orpen, amongst others, the exhibition considers ‘British artists’ quest for an authentic or ‘truthful’ representation of modern war.’ 

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Ivor Gurney - Severn Meadows.