Beyond the geometries

Day two of L’s and my weekend in London and after staying with my mum for the night (I remember little of what L and I used to talk about late into the night when she stayed over when we were at school together, but I’m absolutely certain we never predicted we’d still be doing much the same 50 years on) we went to the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain.
 
I knew some of his war paintings (the blasted trees and geometric landscapes) but not what he’d been painting before (trees that he felt had spirits) nor the fascinating development of his work afterwards as his eye and intelligence took his landscapes towards abstraction then surrealism; how he incorporated found objects and how he then presented real elements of the landscape geometrically. This exhibition was so well put together that his thinking and the development of his ideas were almost audible.
 
I was astonished to discover that the huge dump of German WW2 aircraft on which he based Totes Meer was in Oxford. A bit of googling later and I’ve learnt that the No 1 Metal and Produce Recovery Depot, set up to salvage everything possible from crashed aircraft, was on the site of the Morris car works (now the BMW Mini plant) and that for propaganda reasons he omitted the British planes that it also contained.

This is on till 5 March, Londoners.


This is a staircase in Tate Britain. The extra is a different sort of arch.