Lot 141
Paul Nash (British 1889-1946)
Easter Sunday, 1932
Auction: 14 November 2019 from 13:00 GMT
Description
Monogrammed (lower right) and signed in pencil, watercolour and pencil on paper
Dimensions
37cm x 54.5cm (14.5in x 21.5in)
Footnote
Provenance:
Ernest, Brown & Phillips, Ltd., The Leicester Galleries, London;
Sir Frederick Gibberd C.B.E., R.A.;
Christie's, London, 26 October 1994, lot 77;
Private Collection.
Exhibited:
Ernest, Brown & Phillips, Ltd., The Leicester Galleries, London, Exhibition of Drawings by Paul Nash, November 1932, no.31.
Literature:
Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.418, no. 727, pl. 508;
Apollo, Volume XVI, July 1932-December 1932, The Present Tendency of Paul Nash, p.324 (illustrated).
In the artist John Armstrong's Apollo review of Nash's exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1932 he stated that his work at this exhibition had a unique quality "which is never naked or raw, but at the same time, never allows itself to be dismissed as negligible. This is particularly the case in his present exhibition of water-colours at the Leicester Galleries...The illustrations [in Apollo] give only a hint of the delicacy and significance of the originals, but, in the drawings themselves, this combination of instinct and design is as apparent as in his most considered painting."
In the early 1930s, Nash started to experiment with photographic angles and unexpected cropping in his work, producing perplexing and surreal effects that would come to be a significant part of his oeuvre in this decade. Easter Sunday is an example of him exploring these flattened forms and different plains of vision which purposely disconcert the viewer with inexplicable disjunctures.
