Paul Nash: Sunflower Rises

An English Modernist, Paul Nash (1889–1946) combined a fascination for natural landscapes with his very personal vision of the real and imaginary worlds that surrounded him. This led him to create an extraordinary body of work, which places him among the most important British artists of the twentieth century.

Centred around Paul Nash’s unique perspective, which was inspired by nature, transformed by the two world wars he lived through and influenced by an increasing awareness of his mortality, this exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles brings together some 30 works painted during the period from 1918 to 1946. Nash’s work bears the influence of a multidisciplinary approach, as well as the artist’s interest in a wide range of subjects, from Christian Science to hot air ballooning, and the mystic poets through to archaeology, photography and design.

Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibition begins with an impressive series of paintings made by Nash during the final years of his life: Sunflower and Sun (1942) and its visual explosions. It also includes a series of landscapes and skyscapes painted in the Surrealist style, as well as his precocious melancholic landscapes created in the 1920s as a response to the First World War.

Nash’s paintings are complemented by documentary materials, in particular photographs and archives, which shed light for the first time on an aspect that has previously received little attention: the influence exerted on him by the South of France and French painters.

Curator: Simon Grant

About the artist
Paul Nash was born in London in 1889 and died in Boscombe, Dorset, in 1946. He was raised in Buckinghamshire, where he developed a keen love of the landscape. After failing his naval entrance examination, he chose to become an artist and focused on landscape painting at the Slade School of Art. He enlisted in the army at the beginning of the First World War, but, having been sent to a relatively quiet front in Belgium, he was able to continue painting and became an official war artist in 1917.

After the war he suffered from post-traumatic stress and produced a number of melancholic landscapes. During his time spent in the South of France in the 1920s and 1930s, he encountered the painting of Paul Cézanne and Jean Lurçat, and then in Paris would discover Modernism, after which he became a champion of the European avant-garde in England. At the beginning of the Second World War, he was once again appointed an official war artist.

Paul Nash died just after the end of the war, succumbing to asthma.

Major exhibitions (selection)
Paul Nash, Tate Britain, London, 2017.
Paul Nash photographe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1981. 

Press contact
Pierre Collet, collet@aec-imagine.fr / T +33(0)680 848 771