JAYNE BUCHANAN PhD Candidate in Art History, Plymouth University

 

Jayne's key interest is in art produced in response to wars and conflict. In 2015 I completed a Masters Degree in Art History at Plymouth University which examined the development of the artist Paul Nash through his experiences in the First and Second World Wars, culminating in the thesis ‘Paul Nash: Responses to War’. My current research PhD extends the investigation into war art to examine how our memories of conflict are defined by the art that is produced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Paul Nash: Responses to War"

 

"My research considers the memorialisation of the First and Second World Wars through the work of the artist Paul Nash (1889-1946). I investigate the differing roles of his art: as witness, as an affirmation and commemoration of life, as spiritual resistance and as official war art. Building on existing scholarly literature, I undertake to reframe appreciation of selected examples of Nash’s works by examining them in relation to his wartime experiences and situating them among other art of the period. Using close visual analysis, empirical study and primary archival research I explore the First World War painting The Mule Track (1918), where humans are dominated by the chaos of battle.

 

From his the Second World War work I examine the surrealist collage Follow the Fuhrer, Above the Clouds (1942). The development of these specific paintings is examined in the context of Nash’s life and in the differing social and visual culture of both wars. At the end of the First World War he wrote to his wife of his desire for his art to be a message of the futility of war. By the Second World War his anger was turned to Germany with a desire to have his works produced on cards and dropped on German soil as a message of warning. My research concludes the importance of art as a lasting testament to the horror of war. It documents the change of attitude to conflict which Nash experienced during the two periods and how this was evidenced in the art he created".