The Spectator - October 29, 2016

Sculpture

March of the makers

Niru Ratnam

Tony Cragg

Lisson Gallery, until 5 November

Antony Gormley: Fit

White Cube Bermondsey, until 6

November

Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nes-

tled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Man-

chester Square in Marylebone, an address

once made famous by the cover of a num-

ber of albums by the Beatles. The building

has since been renovated into smart, slightly

anonymous offices and the sculpture suit-

ed it. Few knew that it was a work by Tony

Cragg, who towards the end of the 1980s was

one of Britain’s best known artists, winning

the Turner Prize in 1988 and representing

the country at the Venice Biennale the same

year. Last winter the sculpture, titled ‘Under

Circumstances’, was taken away. There was

no fanfare or report as to why, or where, it

had gone.

It would have been easy to conclude that

this was fair enough. After his high point of

the late 1980s, Cragg quickly faded from

the art-world stage, retreating to Germany

(he moved there in the late 1970s) where

he turned out disappointingly anodyne

sculptures that adorned plazas and lobbies

around the world without ever being par-

ticularly noticed or loved. However, this

would be to ignore the way in which the

British art world has come back to sculp-

ture and assemblage, and in particular to

work with poetic associations. The type of

works that Cragg, when not churning out

works for corporates, has been making

for years.

Visitors to Cragg’s solo exhibition at the

Lisson Gallery are greeted by a series of

increasingly odd forms. Three rusty skeletal

sculptures perch in the old gallery’s front

room, flotsam from another world. The

main room of that gallery has two organ-

ic-looking aluminium forms. Their peeling

paint and sudden deep hollows suggest that

the flesh of whatever creatures these might

be has long since fallen off. Over the road

in the gallery’s new space is a series of tall,

Anish Kapoor announced recently:

‘Modesty aside, I wanted to make a

wonder of the world’

Field was a set of surrealist found objects, in
an English landscape mode.
For all his romanticism, Nash was a keen
follower of the latest developments across
the Channel. For a while he attempted
rather timid experiments with abstraction

— such as ‘Coronilla’ (1929) — and had a
longer flirtation with surrealism, reading
avant-garde magazines while tucked away
in Rye. This interest was more fruitful, pro-
ducing engaging, if quirky, results including
a rare, recently rediscovered Nash sculpture,
‘Moon Aviary’ (1937).
An intriguing section of the exhibition
investigates the byways of English surreal-
ism, but much of the best work in it is by
other artists such as Eileen Agar and Tris-
tram Hillier, who were following a parallel
track. Even the more successful of Nash’s
paintings in this vein, such as ‘Event on the

Nash was instinctively drawn to the

uncanny sense of presence he found in

objects such as eroded stones

Downs’ (1934) — with a giant tennis ball set

against distant white cliffs — seem forced.

The blend he was attempting — two parts

John Sell Cotman to one part René Magritte

— didn’t really cohere.

Surrealists were preoccupied by the sub-

conscious, eroticism and perversity, whereas

the weirdness of England was Nash’s true

subject. He once declared the town of Swa-

nage an example of ‘seaside surrealism’ —

perhaps rightly — but one suspects that the

idea would have come as a surprise to Max

Ernst.

Around the same time, he wrote The

Shell Guide to Dorset — commissioned by

John Betjeman — with an unexpected focus

on the savage, ancient and primitive aspects

of that county: the ‘vicious’ seas around its

coasts, fossils of prehistoric creatures, and

remains at Maiden Castle of a Roman mas-

sacre. In this little book Nash, it seems,

may have been inspired by the thoughts of

Georges Bataille, a Parisian numismatist

who in his spare time advocated an aesthet-

ic based on cruelty and barbarism.

On the face of it, Bataille might seem an

unsuitable guru for Nash — or any roman-

tic Briton. Yet it was the cataclysm of the

two world wars that brought out the best in

Nash as an artist, propelling him from the

engagingly eccentric into the front rank

of British painters — one of the few who

stand out between the death of Turner in

1851 and the rise of Francis Bacon in the

late 1940s.

His first moment of greatness came

after he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, and

was sent on active service to the Western

Front in 1917, succeeded by a spell as an

official war artist. Out of this terrible expe-

rience came a number of powerful pictures

and one out-and-out masterpiece: ‘We Are

Making a New World’ (1918). This is a sub-

lime landscape in the northern romantic

tradition of Caspar David Friedrich and

Turner concerned with death, destruction

and transcendence. The trees have been

shattered by high explosive, the earth con-

vulsed, but the sun is rising again over dis-

tant hills.

After the war, Nash was emotionally

drained; he found a parallel to his inner

sense of numbness in the flat and empty

expanses of the coast at Dymchurch.

He did not hit his absolutely top form

again until the time of the Battle of Brit-

ain. ‘Totes Meer’ (1940–1), depicting the

wreckage of German planes stored in an

outdoor dump near Cowley, is eerily mag-

nificent. ‘Battle of Germany’ (1944), with

the sky blooming with smoke and flames

and dotted with parachutes opening like

flowers, is almost visionary.

In the last few years before he died of

asthma, Nash produced a superb series of

landscapes. These return to his beginnings

— several depict Wittenham Clumps again

— but deepened by the explorations and

experiences that come in between. Pic-

tures such as ‘November Moon’ (1942) and

‘Landscape of the Vernal Equinox’ (1943)

are neither old-fashioned nor modern, but

wonderfully mellow, rich and strange.