6 minute read
Paul Nash and Duncan Grant
Paul Nash (1903-06) and Duncan Grant (1899-1902)
David Roodyn (1967-1971) describes two of the most celebrated British painters of the twentieth century who attended St Paul’s over a seven-year period without being there contemporaneously.
Advertisement
Paul Nash
Paul Nash, the son of a barrister, came under the influence of another Pauline artist Eric Kennington (190004) whose work ‘The Kensingtons at Lavanie’ was featured in the OPC November eNewsletter. Nash fought on the Ypres Salient but was injured falling into a ditch.
After St Paul’s he enrolled at the Slade under the legendary Henry Tonks whose pupils included Ben Nicholson, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Edward Wadhurst. The Royal Academy had been founded in 1768 with Joshua Reynolds its first President but the Slade was less formal and more innovative, for example they admitted women such as Bloomsberry Dora Carrington who enrolled aged seventeen.
Duncan Grant was the son of an impoverished army officer but not a war artist. He is chiefly known as an integral member of the Bloomsbury Set many of whom he painted. He lived at Charleston near Lewes the Sussex outpost of Vanessa Bell and formed a fecund creative relationship with her. Their relationship went from the studio to the bedroom as after a short affair they had a daughter Angelica who married Grant’s lover Bunny Garnett. Grant was a highly successful artist in the inter-war years whose public commissions included Borough Polytechnic, Lincoln Cathedral and RMS Queen Mary but his reputation then waned. It was revived after dealer Daniel Wildenstein’s retrospective in the 1960s and he remains a collectible artist.
Like many an artist it was war that was to define Paul Nash. However in the First World War any artist worked under severe restraints. They could not depict a dead British soldier. Christopher Nevinson had “censored” plastered over his work when he tried to do so. Nash manoeuvred his way round this by depicting felled trees. This was most effective (and depressing) in ‘The Menin Road’ with its stasis of pools of water, felled trees, pallid colours and a confused group of soldiers at the centre. He became an official war artist in 1917.
After the war, Nash though always at heart a landscapist became more of a surrealist. He was fascinated by Freud’s theory of dreams best reflected in his ‘Landscape of a Dream’. He always suffered from asthma though he was a war artist in The Second World War too. His brother John who did not train at the Slade has recently become more and more fashionable. It is a reflection of the promotional operation of the art world that the more of his work that becomes available, the greater the number of publication of articles swelling his reputation.
Landscape of a Dream, Paul Nash
Duncan Grant self-portrait
Duncan Grant was a fully paid up member of the Bloomsbury Set of whom Dorothy Parker wrote, “they lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”.
Duncan Grant did all three. By all accounts he was a kind man and good company. He had a good relationship with Clive Bell notwithstanding an affair with his wife. The Bloomsberries did not do divorce. Grant was a cousin of Lytton Strachey and a good friend of another Pauline Leonard Woolf (1894-99) the husband of Virginia who lived near to Charleston. He founded the Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot and Freud.
Paradoxically and arguably the greatest legacy of Bloomsbury was not on the canvas but in the exhibition hall as at the Grafton Gallery Roger Fry and Clive Bell organised the two post impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. These attracted huge crowds. Victorian art had become introspective and the two exhibitions did much to attract contemporary French art to an enthusiastic art public though no critical acclaim as it was the termed “artquake”. Fry was a huge admirer of Cézanne and Vanessa an early buyer of Picasso.
War artistry is a valuable historical resource. In the very visual age in which we live mobile photos can and do capture the moment over 100 years ago you were reliant on painting to record. John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’ shows a pitiable line of bandaged and blind soldiers moving forward to nowhere. Mark Girtler’s superficially irreverent ‘Carousel’ must surely have inspired Richard Attenborough director of Oh! What a Lovely War with much of it filmed on Brighton Pier. Art is as important as the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen in the Great Debate of patriotism/King and Country versus the loss of a generation. Neither Paul Nash’s unfinished autobiography Outline nor Hilary Spurling’s definitive biography of Duncan Grant is especially illuminating on their time at St Paul’s. I had a vision of Paul Nash and Eric Kennington (1900-04) in the St Paul’s Art studio with an inspired art teacher and a furious Dr Walker (High Master 1876-1905) railing at the door demanding the two aesthetes translate Virgil in his classics class. Instead the only reference was this: “Wandering up to the first floor I found it pleasurably flooded with the afternoon sun in which the modelling of the various busts and statues of the antique showed up well. In the middle of the corridor perched on a stool was a fair-sized swarthy boy drawing at an easel. I recognised in this phenomenon Eric Kennington who looked as no other man but like a bird on a perch knocking off likeness of the plaster cast and whistling tunelessly the while”.
Nash who struggled at maths went to a crammer to prepare for his naval exams that he failed. Despite a lack of drawing talent especially of the face, the Slade made him the considerable artist he became.
Duncan Grant arrived at St Paul’s aged 14 the beneficiary of a fee-paying scheme for army children. He won seven prizes for art but failed admission to the Royal Academy Schools and went instead to the Westminster School of Art. The reputation of Grant today is harder to evaluate. He suffered as many of the twentieth century British artists did for lack of classification and great popularity. The great debate of twentieth century British art was between the figurative and the abstract. The President of the Academy Sir Alfred Munnings, the worse for wear after a dinner in 1946, castigated Picasso to which the Spanish genius retorted that British art was too pretty. Grant was probably in the figurative school. In my opinion his best work was his portraiture of the Bloomsberries. I am not qualified to judge which of Nash or Grant is the superior artist and such comparisons are not that productive but if offered a choice on which I would prefer on my wall I would take Grant’s sensual portrait of Vanessa Bell over ‘The Menin Road’ as I would find it more uplifting.
