Paul Nash

Maurice J. Speiser, circa 1931-2
Parke-Bernet, New York, 1944
Waddington & Tooth Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner, 10th May 1978

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Recent Developments in British Painting, 1st - 17th October 1931, cat. no.3;
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Winter Exhibition, 1931.

John Armstrong, 'Tooth's "Recent Developments in British Painting,"' Weekend Review, 17th October 1931;
New York Times, 29th November 1932, illustrated;
Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin, January 1932, illustrated;
Herbert Read, Art Now, 1960, illustrated pl.110, no.PN30;
Margot Eates, Paul Nash: 1889-1946, John Murray Ltd, London, 1973, p.124 (date of execution given as 1932);
Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, cat. no.702, illustrated pl.42, p.44;
James King, Interior Landscapes, A Life of Paul Nash, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1987, p.130.

The canvas has been relined. There are minor stretcher bar marks about all but the right edge and some frame abrasion along the top edge. There are some very minor lines of craquelure scattered visible upon close inspection, including to the grey pigment upper left, to the egg, to the chair lower left, and to the door lower right. Otherwise the surface is slightly dirty but is in generally good condition with areas of strong impasto. Ultraviolet light reveals very minor flecked cosmetic retouchings, including one to the back of the chair, one to the centre of the door on the right and a few near the upper and lower left corners, to the egg and along the right edge. Held in a painted and gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Of all the painters of his generation, Nash is perhaps the most elusive. Whilst the apocalyptic images of the Western Front brought him fame, they are very different from what followed. During the 1920s we see a period of readjustment, a re-immersion in the pastoral, the intimate, but by the end of that decade, a metaphysical element was making itself felt in his paintings.

By the time of Salome, painted in 1931, Nash had manoeuvred his paintings into a position that, like a dream, feel somehow right yet are almost impossible to align with actuality. This tantalising quality is something that has clearly been a considerable conundrum for commentators over the years. In the recent exhibition of Nash's work at Dulwich Picture Gallery, the catalogue reprinted against each exhibit the writings of many of the great Nash scholars. Rarely did one see much concensus, yet each proposed interpretation seemed to have some validity. If one takes the case of The Nest of the Siren (Government Art Collection) of 1930-31, a painting which does perhaps have a connection to Salome, it is interesting to see the completely differing interpretations taken by two of the titans of study into Nash's work, Anthony Bertram and Margot Eates. Bertram takes a symbolic approach, seeing the objects as revealing a somewhat damning view of the dangers of the female siren. Eates, however, sees this as incorrect, preferring to see the collection and placement of the elements and objects within the picture as more akin to an objet trouvé. In general, more recent writers have perhaps tended to follow the symbolic line in Nash's paintings of this period, but that there is still room for considerable variance in interpretation is clear.

How then are we to look at Salome? The elements which form the painting are fairly clear. A book, with the title Salome emblazoned on its cover, sits, perhaps a little precariously, on the edge of a carved chaise or sofa. A bowl, simple of form and plain of colour, rests upon this, and in it an egg-shaped form is placed. Using our sense of the scale of the objects around it, this would appear to be somewhere in size between an ostrich egg and a rugby ball. Behind the sofa, a folding screen is partially covered by cloth hanging over it, and at the edge two skeins of wool, one black and one white, also hang down. The setting appears to be indoors, and the closeness of the objects to each other and the enclosing form of the screen does make for a slightly claustrophobic atmosphere. Clearly the intentionally central use of the Salome theme forces one to make connections to the well-known biblical story. Although it had been treated by many writers and composers, there is a topical element here in that Oscar Wilde's 1891 play Salome had only had its ban by the Lord Chamberlain lifted almost concurrently with this painting, its first British public performance having taken place at the Savoy Theatre in October 1931, the same month the present work was exhibited at Arthur Tooth & Sons. The theme of seduction and decapitation that is central to the story may be of help here, or maybe not. To see the egg-shaped form as a head is perhaps a little too literal, yet it is hard to escape from such a reading. The placement and positioning above the sofa has something figural about it, and indeed the 'head' shape is not unlike those of the wooden lay figures that appear in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, whose work had recently been shown in London. If Salome can be linked, as indeed some writers have, with other paintings of the period such as Nest of the Siren that can be seen to have an element of their imagery touching on an interpretation of the female as dangerous, then the slightly boudoir feel to the setting begins to make sense. Perhaps this too is a nest of the siren, but whereas the earlier painting of that title uses a slightly bric-a-brac set of objects to carry its message, here things feel a lot more contemporary. The colours, pale tones, contrasting with black and white, have an air of the interiors of the period or those used by Nash's friend Ben Nicholson in his paintings.

Interpretations of Nash's paintings in the 1930s are notoriously varied. In Salome we can see some of the factors that make for such intangibility, a collection of mostly identifiable objects gathered in such a way as to suggest they occupy a place beyond their real forms. As such, this is the element of Nash's painting that is one of its most significant achievements, and one that over sixty years after his death seems unlikely to diminish.