Paul Nash's Hauntings

While working on writing for the Tate's upcoming retrospective I've been impressed by Nash's position in relation to certain significant cultural discourses. He emerges around 1910, amongst the cultural settings of Georgian Poetry and the writing of W.B.Yeats. Fantasy novels and supernatural fictions of Empire were abidingly formative for him. Margaret Odeh, the Suffragette- of Egyptian/Jordanian heritage -became Nash's wife and a leading English exponent of Christian Science in the UK. During the interwar period Nash's adoption of aspects of Surrealism could be accounted for as one more appropriation from a very heterogeneous spectrum of contemporary cultural modernism, one which extended across popular radio comedy programmes, the 'low' comic book drawings of the 'screwball' American-Jewish artist Milt Gross, the milieu of ex-colonial rentiers of Rye and the comparative anthropology of Sir George James Frazer.

mage credit: Paul Nash, Untited, 1940. Digital image courtesy of Tate, London 2015