The Menin Road

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The Menin Road (Paul Nash)
The Menin Road
Paul Nash , 1919
Oil on canvas
183 × 318 cm
Imperial War Museum in London

The Menin Road (The Road to Menen ) is a large format oil painting by Paul Nash (1889-1946), completed in 1919, showing a World War I battlefield in Belgium . The British War Memorials Committee had commissioned Nash to capture the events on the Western Front for a planned national memorial hall ( Hall of Remembrance ) in a picture. The painting is considered one of the most famous artistic representations of the First World War and is now on display at the Imperial War Museum in London .

prehistory

Australian soldiers at the Ypres Arch, 1917

In September 1914, the British government set up a War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House near London Waterloo Station to influence opinion at home and abroad. In 1916, a department for the distribution of information and documentation materials was established in Wellington House and the idea of sending artists to the Western Front was developed . In February 1918, Max Aitken appointed head of the newly created (1879-1964) Ministry of Information appointed (Ministry of Information). Aitken founded a committee for war memorials (British War Memorials Committee BWMC). This committee then began to recruit artists to document what was happening in France and on the home front in the form of works of art. One of the painters chosen was Paul Nash. He had been in the spring of 1917 in the British Expeditionary Force ( British Expeditionary Force BEF) on the Ypres Salient served on the Western Front.

The order

Wounded on the road to Menen in 1917

In November 1917, Paul Nash returned to the Ypres Arch as an official war painter. At this point the Third Battle of Flanders was drawing to a close. In the following weeks, Nash visited battlefields from the course of the war on the road from Ypres to Menen and made around fifty front drawings. While driving, Nash came under fire and survived thanks to the quick reaction of his driver.

In April 1918, Paul Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to create a large battlefield scene for a planned national memorial hall ( Hall of Remembrance ). The memorial hall should serve as a documentation and memorial for the First World War. Planned themes for the presentation were the army , the air force , the navy and the civilian population on the home front called in to support the fighting troops . Paintings were commissioned from well-known artists, including John Singer Sargent , Henry Tonks , Percy Wyndham Lewis , Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer .

The Ypres arch with the road to Menen through the village of Gheluvelt (right)

Paul Nash decided to depict a section of the Ypres arch that had been devastated in the Third Battle of Flanders during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. Nash originally intended to give the painting the title A Flanders Battlefield , but decided to name it The Menin Road . He considered the area around the road near the village of Gheluvelt to be one of the most terrible places on the Western Front.

Completion

Nash began designing the large canvas , which covered an area of ​​5.8 square meters , in June 1918 at Tubbs Farm near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire . As a studio , Paul Nash used a shed that he shared with his younger brother John Nash (1893–1977). He was also a painter and worked on a war painting entitled Over the Top . However, they had to leave the shed without being able to complete their work. Paul Nash had to move twice more before he was able to complete his painting in February 1919 in a small chamber on Gower Street in London's West End .

The paintings

Funnel field near Gheluvelt on the road to Menen

Paul Nash composed the picture in three broad strips. The lower strip contains concrete blocks , corrugated iron and full explosion craters , which seal off the picture space from the front. In the middle strip, two soldiers try to follow an almost unrecognizable road. Along the road, which is interrupted by shell holes, a few defoliated tree stumps rise into the sky and cast long shadows on the ground. Behind the trees, the battlefield extends to the horizon, with a tangle of streams and a forest of stunted trees in the background. The third strip is a sky full of clouds of mist and smoke. Two rays of sun breaking through the clouds that look like cannon barrels cut the sky diagonally. Overall, the picture shows a largely destroyed landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

Nash suggested the following inscription for the painting: "The picture shows a tract of country near Gheluvelt village in the sinister district of 'Tower Hamlets', perhaps the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theaters of War." ( The picture shows a piece of land near the village of Gheluvelt in the eerie 'Tower Hamlets' district, perhaps the most feared and catastrophic place in any of the theaters of war. ) A collection of small, ground-level bunkers ( pillboxes ) that the German Army had built here, called the British "Tower Hamlets" after the then disreputable London Borough of Tower Hamlets . Paul Nash called The Menin Road one of his best paintings.

Aftermath

Imperial War Museum

The commissioned artists had made very individual contributions, so that the paintings could hardly be merged into the planned overall concept of the memorial hall. In addition, there was unsecured financing for the construction project. In 1919 the project fell under the purview of the Imperial War Museum and was soon abandoned. The completed works of art were integrated into the art collection of the Imperial War Museum. At the beginning of World War II , the paintings were moved from the Imperial War Museum to a less endangered location outside of London as part of an evacuation plan . After the end of the war, all the paintings were brought back.

Paul Nash suffered a breakdown due to his wartime experience , which weakened him for a long time. During the Second World War he was commissioned again as an official war artist to record the events of the war on canvas. Due to his poor health, Nash stayed in the UK this time. Less than a year after the end of the war, Paul Nash died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 57 .

literature

  • Paul James Gough: A Terrible Beauty: War, British Artists and the First World War. Sansom and Company, Bristol 2010, ISBN 9781906593001 .
  • Terry Charman, Jesse Alter, Roger Tolson (Eds.): Art from the First World War. Imperial War Museum 2008, ISBN 9781904897989 .

Web links