I wonder...

[faustus]

Today has been a day of epiphanies and revelations, as well as failures to change light bulbs, get up at a reasonable time and to get to bed before midnight. I have had thoughts about the cosy catastrophe, which I will pass on in due course, but I have also partly solved a mystery of what my gallery-going is building up to. My wider sense of (especially British) surrealist and modernist art 1900-1940ish remains puzzling - although I can trace the trajectory - but the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition of Paul Nash clearly needs to be thrown at Keith Roberts (and Eric Ravilious is presumably not far behind*), with the paradoxical sense that modern and romantic ought to seem more antithetical.


* Not far behind? Oh fuck... The Chalk Giants?:

This is the Long Man of Wilmington. See also:

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Some days I scare myself. There may also be a Cerne Abbas out there, but I've not found it yet.

Nash was an influence on Ravilious, of course. Wish I'd seen the exhibition in Chichester in 2009. If memory serves, there's something similar coming up, but I can't work out what. (Maybe I'm misremembering British sculpture at the RAA?)

I don't have time or words for this in the current project - whose Post-Imperial Melancholy chapter needs sections on Compton and Kilworth to complete - but one more for the to-do list...


(in any case I need to think of the linkage between Nash and Nicholson's odd welding of landscape-still-life-abstract, and then the connection to Mondrian which will be explored by a Courtauld Institute exhibition next year.)