The booth, from the Piano Nobile gallery, will be Nash’s biggest-ever display in New York. It will show oil paintings, prints and photographs from key phases of Nash’s career; the collection includes “Atlantic Voyage,” a photograph that he took while traveling to New York by ship in 1931.
The gallery is one of 33 in the Spotlight section, selected by the section’s curatorial adviser, Laura Hoptman, executive director of the Drawing Center in New York.
Why Nash? “Our tastes are cyclical,” Hoptman said. “There’s a renewed interest in historical artists of the 20th century, pre-World War II artists with a particular interest in surrealism.”
These days, she said, “things can be recuperated and made new again.” In present-day contemporary art, “you don’t have one or two or three things happening, but everything happening at the same time.”
And, she added, a Paul Nash painting “could just have easily have been done today. Culture and time are disassociated. It’s called atemporality.”
Born into a comfortable middle-class family in London in 1889, Nash moved to the countryside in his early teens. There, he developed a passion for nature and landscape, which would become a defining characteristic of his art.
He attended the respected Slade School of Fine Art for a little more than a year, beginning his artistic career immediately afterward. His depictions of the English landscape — its fields and woods, farms and hedges — were shown in London.
But when World War I broke out, he could not stay away from the front. As his wife, Margaret Odeh Nash, later said, “Although he was the last human being in the world to tolerate the horror and cruelty of war, he had an immediate and firm conviction that he must fight for England.”
And fight he did, until an accidental fall and rib fracture in May 1917 led to his repatriation. Paintings he had made on the battlefront were shown soon afterward in London. Later that year, he was named an official war artist and sent to the front to depict the conflict.
In 1918, at war’s end, Nash produced “We Are Making a New World,” a macabre vision of broken trees in a shellshocked landscape, considered one of his seminal works. This and his other war paintings were far removed from the idyllic depictions of the countryside in his past.
After the start of World War II, Nash was reappointed an official war artist and returned to the battlefield, although he already suffered from an asthmatic condition; it eventually caused his death in 1946. He produced another memorable war work, “Totes Meer (Dead Sea)” (1940-41), a desolate image of wrecked planes with wounded wings overlapping like ocean waves.
In between the two wars, Nash made repeated trips to France and became fascinated with and influenced by surrealism. Back in Britain, he set up the Unit One movement in 1933 as “the expression of a truly contemporary spirit” in art. He embraced abstraction and helped set up the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, which showed work by him and other artists.
“Nash has always been right at the heart of what’s thought of as traditional British art, but he was much more than that,” said Emma Chambers, curator of a Nash exhibition that opened in 2016 at Tate Britain.
By the 1930s, he was “not a traditional landscape painter at all,” she added. His paintings of nature had turned into “strange and uncanny” visions, full of “out-of-scale objects” that one might encounter in a surrealist canvas.
The Tate’s show coincided with commemorations of the centenary of World War I. “Nash was seen as an artist ripe for re-examination,” Chambers noted, and one who would be “popular with the public” in Britain.
In the past decade or so, Nash’s art-market prices have climbed. A 1936 surrealist painting, “Encounter in the Afternoon,” sold for 937,250 pounds (about $1.8 million at the time) at a Christie’s London auction in 2008, five times its upper estimate. At a Bonhams auction in 2014, the 1913 watercolor “A Drawing” sold for 212,500 pounds — a record price for a Nash watercolor and triple its estimate.
According to Piano Nobile’s director, Matthew Travers, Nash’s works are being acquired globally by buyers including the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates.
Hoptman said the Spotlight booth will have Nash works from all periods.
“It will certainly be a good introduction to who Nash was,” she added, “and how he fits into the history of art.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.