Private Painter

Until he died in 1946, Painter Paul Nash had escaped official honors. The retrospective show of his paintings at London's Tate Gallery last week was a national accolade, and it made Nash the talk of the town.

Along with the Lord Chancellor (Viscount Jowitt) and Sir Stafford Cripps, Queen Elizabeth herself had attended the posh but chilly opening (there was a stokers' strike). The 68 oils and 76 water colors on exhibition brightened the gallery air and thawed most critics' reserve. "What other British artist of this generation," asked the Sunday Times, "could fill the Tate . . . without a hint of monotony?" Added the Spectator: "Perhaps the most consistently fine water colorist of the 20th Century."

Water color is one medium at which Englishmen have generally excelled; Nash's handling of it was traditionally deft and cool. He turned his back on the cities and factories, and painted in the serenity of his own garden and his grey-carpeted studio. Almost no human figures marred the privacy of the world he painted. Aside from his technique, and a faintly romantic air, there was nothing traditional about that world; Nash's water colors and oils alike were halfway abstract. "Nature we need not deny," he once explained, "but art ... should control."

As one means of control, Nash used to impose geometrical patterns on his landscapes and still lifes, reshaping hills, trees and flower pots to suit his highly refined taste. The results looked arbitrarily prettified, at first, but in spite of that (or perhaps because of it) they sold.

His early popularity did not fool Nash; he was plagued by a sense of his own inadequacy as well as by ill health. Leaning on his silver-headed cane, he explored the English countryside, gradually learned to search out the geometry existing in what he saw, and to base his designs on that.

The results were varied and poetic as they were abstract: he painted the sea to look like a flight of cold, curling steps, and made forests echo the architecture of cathedrals. During World War II he based one exultant canvas on the vapor trails of bombers and fighters overhead, and another, gloomy one, on a moonlit junkyard swimming with wrecked planes. When he was dying, at 57, he painted sunflowers, which turn their yellow disks to the slow geometric arc of the sun.

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