Christopher Neves classic book is a journey into the imagination through the English landscape. How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? Painting, says Neve, is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis. What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time, for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, the spirit in the mass to David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters ideas on specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the garden.
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Yes, you can access Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Paul Nashâs places have in common a dumb brightness and a sense of concealment. He had an orderly mind and a consistent view of the world that was part poetry and part graphic design. His fragile method was to apply to English landscape a form of ancient surrealism, like a water diviner or a finder of ley-lines on chalk, who does not actually alter anything but who has some odd quality that enables him to hint at what may be hidden.
It meant that all his life he had to look for places and objects which carried for him a particular charge. He found it, as you would expect, in ancient sites, in clumps and standing stones, where the enormity of what had passed was still in the air like electricity. But he also found it behind unexpected buildings, in gardens, or left lying on the beach.
His way of encapsulating this oddness was a kind of archaeology. Archaeology implies getting at time by uncovering something, and yet when you look at his pictures you cannot escape the curious sensation that what they are doing is covering something up. They litter the ground, with cylinders, flints, fallen trees, pyramids, crashed aeroplanes, tennis balls. Like the standing stones set up by primitive man to mark his place, these are plainly monuments in the landscape. But monuments to what?
Here are five uncompliant landscapes drawn by Nash. They are not intended to be seen as narrative, though written about sequentially. They are meant as a commentary on the pictures, which I hope to suggest have to do with poetry and, most of all, with time.
It was in the wire-filled and table-flat garden of his fatherâs new house at Iver Heath, in Buckinghamshire, about 1913, that Paul Nashâs pictorial imagination could be said to have first twitched and woken up. It was an impossibly starry night, and the trees that lined the edge of the croquet lawn seemed inordinately tall.
Straight paths, edged and gravelled, led from the house to the kitchen garden where his younger brother preferred to draw vegetables in the afternoons. Paul Nash concentrated on drawing the intersecting paths and the hatched rectangles of wire netting which ruled off the herbaceous borders from the cornfields out of which the new garden had been bitten. He liked their geometry. When he looked up at the house, its architecture must have produced in him a similar sensation of order. Like a dormie house or a seaside villa, it seems now more Thirties in feel than Edwardian. Some of its window-frames were placed at corners so that they faced on to two sides of the building.
But mostly he drew the trees. He drew them not at all in a generalized way but as individuals. They were elms and acacias. He showed their twigs and branches in an unblinking stare by daylight and as ink silhouettes at night, the sky behind them crowded with stars and shooting stars, star-dust.
About the same time, he began going to stay with an uncle at Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire, and drawing the twin stands of tall beeches called Wittenham Clumps (II). He drew them always from a distance, as he saw them from his bedroom window or on bicycle rides, emphasizing the wide space they occupy on the two mounds of the Sinodun Hills. Sometimes he drew cloud shadow feeling its way across the contours of the landscape and sweeping up to cross the clumps. Sometimes he filled the air around the trees with flocks of pencilled birds, so distant that they are little gnats on a warm evening. He had noticed while drawing in the garden at Iver Heath how several trees growing together could take on the silhouette of a single one. In the Wittenham Clumps drawings he made the trees, isolated and pressed together tightly on their hilltops, into erect bundles like bunches of celery.
In Wytschaete Woods the trees were blasted apart. He drew them as splinters and stumps. In the Ypres salient, near Vimy, and along the Menin road in 1917, he drew the remaining trees like broken crosses, the sky beyond them no longer full of birds or stars but of constellations that exploded.
At Dymchurch, on the Kent coast, he began to paint the bleak shore. âA war artist without a warâ he called himself in the Twenties. Instead of defences against armies he drew defences against the sea, the only bombardment the bombardment of waves. As if his mind had been emptied by the horrors of war, and by the jostling of men and transport, his preoccupation became vacancy. He showed how concrete ramps and army-grey shingle sloped into the grey sea towards France. It was a landscape that replaced the urgency of suffering with the vacant afternoon of no feeling at all.
He drew the sea like a frozen layered mere; as salty levels, flat as the Marsh on the other side of the coast road. Rather than show its flying movement, the way the waves run in to be bayonetted by the breakwaters, he stopped it dead and related it to the steps and wedges of the land.
Once, before the war, he had invented a subject that prefigured this. Wanting clear, architectural shapes, he had drawn pyramids, but instead of setting them on the flat surface of the sand he had placed them in the sea. He saw them as if in a dream against a night sky. Their great bulk, threatened by the humped water, had stood for impossible oppositions â the still and the moving, the live and the dead, the irresistible force and the immovable object. The vacant stare of the Dymchurch pictures depends on their being of landscape in bland daylight, in a dead month, in a dead year, at a dead time of day: the spirit at low tide. Pursue their solid geometry west to Swanage ten years later and you find it lying in the bright light of Thirties modernism and casting unarguable fretwork shadows.
All these drawings and photographs, many of which became paintings, have something peculiar about them. In the first place they are extremely formal and orderly as pieces of design. A subject always needed to appeal to the geometric side of his painterâs nature, the side that made him a modernist graphic designer and design teacher in the Thirties. He was also an engraver of adventurous geometric shapes although he could never bring himself to relinquish reality entirely. Without the geometry of the landscape he could not begin to show his essential subject, the place where something had been. It was as if, even in the first Iver Heath drawings, the geometry was the trap. The landscape was the occasion and the vessel (Anne Ridler in a surrealist poem of 1939).
Caught by it, like the ghost in the machine, was something unpaintable, indefinable. That was his true subject, but the best he could do was to mark its place; the extreme oddness of landscape is that it always marks a place. But how it keeps its secrets! How remorselessly it conceals the feelings that have exhausted themselves in it! Its age and its inertia have nothing to do with us. We can scratch it or build on it or burn it but it will no more accept our passions or our actions than a stone picked up will accept the warmth of a hand. Nash looked for this concealment in his cool and orderly English way, watching for signs.
Test this idea against the pictures mentioned so far. I have made a loaded comparison at the beginning between the trees he drew in his fatherâs garden and the trees of Wittenham Clumps. The Iver Heath trees occupy their spaces like Nashâs first personages. Behind them, defining them, are the immense starry skies that will eventually spawn the cartwheeling planets of his last pictures. Hardy is a poet who seems often to be relevant to Nash. Hardy wrote once that he could identify a mountain at night by the absence of stars within its shape. The trees of Wittenham Clumps, on the other hand, are not just any trees. The strange twin hills on which they stand are potent, dreamlike and inexplicable. They have that magnetic effect of many high places, but they also mean something.
From the time he first saw the Clumps, Nash never got them entirely out of his mind. He must have climbed up to them as a boy and never really escaped them. They mark an Iron Age fort, Stone Age ditches, the burial places of Roman pottery and Saxon bones, many layers of occupation, all of them hidden between roots and cowslips. Even the tree-trunks are entirely enveloped by nineteenth-century graffiti enlarged by the years into indecipherable hieroglyphics on stretched columns. The hills themselves, which he always shows at a distance, are monuments in the landscape. If he could now extend this principle so that almost any corner of a field or stretch of beach marked the site of some event buried alive, he could transfigure even the most inert countryside into a minefield of the psyche.
There were two ways open to him. Either he could paint places that had a cosmic charge because of their history and pre-history, like Wittenham Clumps, Avebury, Silbury and Stonehenge, all of which he studied, or he could use a curious landscape of natural or displaced objects. Perhaps he would not have hit on this without the example of European surrealism or without photography. The very act of squaring something up in a viewfinder marks it off from the rest of the world and gives it an unnatural emphasis. Compare his paintings of standing stones at Avebury, terrifyingly mute, with his photographs of chalk stacks at Handfast Point, in Dorset. He treated them both with equal emphasis. The stones stand for something; the stacks, shaped by the sea, have no meaning beyond themselves â though they have a powerful presence emphasized by their human names, Old Harry and Old Harryâs Wife.
Scrutinizing the landscape, he found presences hidden everywhere. Personages, he called them. Standing or fallen objects had always seemed to him to give off a mysterious power. They wait, listening: a collapsed tree, a root like a dangling man, a row of diversâ suits crucified upside down to dry. None of these would be as worrying if Nash did not somehow contrive to put them out of place.
It is as though objects have detached themselves from the surrounding land and, looming, become protagonists in strange encounters. Before he moved into Swanage in 1934 he was living at a farmhouse beyond the bungaloid development of the town on Ballard Down. From his window he painted the shoulder of the down, the chalk cliffs partly masking the distant headland, on a bright day. On the grass in the foreground he showed the crabbed shape of a tree-stump which had detached itself from the row of dead tress that marches into the view from the left, and beside it, its clear circle opposed to it in every way, he placed a tennis ball. It is as white as the cliff beyond, and as large as one of his swollen moons, fallen. Across it goes the pure double curve of its seam. These two objects lie quietly next to one another, male and female, age and youth, for no apparent reason and giving nothing away.
It could be that Nash felt he might get at the mysterious essence of landscape by putting references to specific parts of it in the foreground, as though, on a cliff walk, for example, he had picked up things that were somehow representative of the whole view. His experiments in photographing groups of small related objects in close-up might well have led to this. On a doormat or a breadboard he constructed henges of his own: shaky assemblies of random objects, cardboard tubes and fragments of bark, their impermanence photographed pointblank as though they were exercises in relating abstract sculptural shapes or unexplained exhibits on a nature table. Transposed to the real landscape in paintings, they become surreal monuments which declare themselves unequivocally, pristine and specific, and yet are as gagged when it comes to expressing any real meaning as the tree-stump or the tennis ball.
Does not all landscape suggest this muteness? The state in which the world refuses to yield its meanings is described by Baudelaire as lack of grace, or spleen, the condition in which the viewer feels himself excommunicated. Nash could stiffen the sense of things being out of place by altering their element. He had altered the element of the pyramids by standing them, like the jetty he drew at Swanage, among the huge geometric slopping of the sea. Swanage Bay appears in a chalk-dry watercolour. It is drawn clearly and literally. Shown floating in the bay, with equal simplicity and conviction, as though someone giving a factual account of something were to include in passing a tremendous lie, there is a giant fungus. It needs no explanation. It does not symbolize anything. It is simply a fungus of the kind that Hardy, too, had noticed often in the Dorset landscape, describing it as looking like the liver and kidneys of dead animals. Nash transcribed it with a shock into the water.
In all these examples, the artistâs lucid literary style makes the viewer feel that he should be able to read a meaning. Nash sets the meaning out as if it is plainly self-evident. But the pictures, like the landscape itself, enunciate with the greatest clarity a language beyond words. The nearest it is possible to approach is via the language of shape. That is mute, in a way that land is mute. Again, his camera may have given him his first clear realization of this. In photographs, he often discovered analogies between one shape and another, between far and near, large and small, between, for example, a foreground standing stone and a distant clump. His pictures are full of these repeated forms. At the base of the chalk stacks at Handfast Point there are long, smooth indentations, like a glazierâs thumbmark in putty round a window-frame. The waves, as they hit this, move upwards and then fall back to spread out in concentric rings and lobes of foam precisely like the fungus that Nash drew unaccountably floating in the bay. The landscape both has a code and is one.
The critic is a vandal. I do not want to choose a conclusion and use any retrospective hypothesis to prove it. Only the pictures are important, but at least try the possibility that the clue to all this is time.
It is time that makes Wittenham Clumps so potent, and Stonehenge and Silbury. It is the inordinate extent of time that makes us impotent in the landscape and aware of our own hopeless limitations in respect of it. It is time that hangs up in Nashâs moons and night skies at the start of his career; time that suspends an exploding shell, a trajectory of mud, and allows fragments to settle in a changed order. In his drawings the shadow of an isolated figure on a clifftop, on a zigzag path leading to a beech hanger or on steps down to the shore, suggest remembered occasions like those in Hardyâs poetry. Nash cannot have failed to notice the surreal brevity of the shutterâs click in relation to the unimaginable antiquity of the sites he photographed and subsequently painted.
Life looks like painting but has the attributes of music and writing. Painting shows one moment. It is how we perceive the world to be. The characteristic of reality is that it is made up of frozen moments (discrete time), perceived one after another. Music, most abstract of all the arts, does not exist until it is heard. It depends, like life, on development, which is why it has a hotline to the emotions. Writing, in a comparable way, exists only sequentially. But paintings represent one moment, continually. That they are objects and not ideas is their strength and their limitation.
It is the moment that often produces the poem or the painting, especially the exceptional moment articulated suddenly within the everyday. Light strikes the side of a building and transfigures it. Hazlitt described this sensation in Nashâs landscape when he walked from Winterslow to Stonehenge and lay, looking up at the sky, on Salisbury Plain. Hardy could make his pestered sea or full-starred heavens freeze in precisely recalled instants. Edward Thomas, whom Nash knew, could stop a summerâs afternoon in the bird-filled, pre-war countryside with the slamming of a train-carriage door at Adlestrop.
Edward Thomasâs poetry is about the countryside, but as Geoffrey Grigson has pointed out, his essential subject lies elsewhere, somehow beneath it. If Nashâs essential subject was time, he used landscape as its marker and its monument because, as a painter, that was the limit of his resources. He was not old (in his mid- fifties) by the time he came to paint his last pictures, but there is a looseness and freedom, almost an impatience, in their handling and design that is quite different from the clear marquetry with which he constructed his traps before. In the end he gave up the dryness which had led Ben Nicholson to remark that he could not look at Nashâs work without having to drink a glass of water.
The last pictures are again of Wittenham Clumps, but this time the beech trees are not seen and drawn from boyhood bicycling distance but from very far away, from the esca...
