Totes Meer, 1940–1, by Paul Nash (1889–1946), 40in by 60in, Tate Collection.
Robert Macfarlane says: 'A half moon, a grey-blue sky, the distant hint of a ridge and a shimmering silver sea of twisted fuselage and shot-up wing. Nash’s painting thrillingly chills me and, whenever I see it, my eye seeks out the sinister gliding back of that white owl in the top right corner, another kind of aerial hunter out for its prey. Totes Meer takes the English pastoral and torques it, trashes it. Along with Ravilious’s war paintings, Nash’s vision has shaped my own writing about the English landscape, helping me to see conflict as a condition of place, terrain as a function of wreckage and the natural as inextricable from the anthropic.'
Robert Macfarlane is the author of a number of books about landscape and the imagination, including The Wild Places, The Old Ways and, most recently, Landmarks. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
John McEwen comments on Totes Meer:
In the First World War, Paul Nash saw action on the Western Front as an officer before he was appointed an official war artist. In the Second World War, he was re-appointed to work on the Home Front. In 1941, he wrote to the Ministry of Information: ‘I should like [my official war] pictures to be used directly or indirectly as propaganda.’
Nash lived in Oxford, where Morris Motors had been partially assigned to aircraft production. Wrecked British and German planes were brought for recycling to the Metal Produce Recovery Unit at Cowley, a 100-acre field used as a dump. ‘The thing looked to me suddenly like a great inundating sea,’ the artist wrote. ‘You might feel—under certain influence—a moonlight night for instance—this is a vast tide moving across the field, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain.’ In keeping with its propagandist purpose, the resulting picture showed only German planes and he gave it a German title, Totes Meer (‘dead sea’), but it transcends propaganda and, therefore, time. He had provided a First World War masterpiece with his desolate Menin Road. Totes Meer is its Second World War equivalent.
The Imperial War Museum has a painting by Frances MacDonald of the Cowley dump. The wreckage is placed in the landscape. The season is suitably wintry and it has greater documentary interest, but it lacks Nash’s ‘very special talent for rendering certain poetical aspects... no other artist could’, as the art critic Roger Fry wrote to him in 1917.
The exhibition ‘Paul Nash’ will open at Tate Britain on October 26, 2016.
-
If the future of Ferrari is electric vehicles, then it is our future tooIt's widely believed that Ferrari will unveil its first electric car this year. It's the signal that the internal combustion era is coming to an end.
-
Gaze over Cap Ferrat in this four-bedroom French villaIgnore the wind and the rain. Imagine yourself in this hillside home with some of the best views the Mediterranean can offer.
-
'As a child I wanted to snuggle up with the dogs and be part of it': Alexia Robinson chooses her favourite paintingAlexia Robinson, founder of Love British Food, chooses an Edwin Landseer classic.
-
The Pre-Raphaelite painter who swapped 'willowy, nubile women' for stained glass — and created some of the best examples in BritainThe painter Edward Burne-Jones turned from paint to glass for much of his career. James Hughes, director of the Victorian Society, chooses a glass masterpiece by Burne-Jones as his favourite 'painting'.
-
'I can’t look away. I’m captivated': The painter who takes years over each portrait, with the only guarantee being that it won't look like the subjectFor Country Life's My Favourite Painting slot, the writer Emily Howes chooses a work by a daring and challenging artist: Frank Auerbach.
-
My Favourite Painting: Rob HouchenThe actor Rob Houchen chooses a bold and challenging Egon Schiele work.
-
My Favourite Painting: Jeremy Clarkson'That's why this is my favourite painting. Because it invites you to imagine'
-
The chair of the National Gallery names his favourite from among the 2,300 masterpieces — and it will come as a bit of a shockAs the National Gallery turns 200, the chair of its board of trustees, John Booth, chooses his favourite painting.
-
'A wonderful reminder of what the countryside could and should be': The 200-year-old watercolour of a world fast disappearingChristopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust on the bucolic beauty of The Magic Apple Tree by Samuel Palmer, which he nominates as his favourite painting.
-
My favourite painting: Andrew Graham-Dixon'Lesson Number One: it’s the pictures that baffle and tantalise you that stay in the mind forever .'
