Autumn Art Lectures 2014: : Professor Paul Gough on Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer

“I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.” Paul Nash’s embittered memories of the Western Front produced some of the most searing paintings of the First World War; his taut renditions introduced a new language of devastation to the genre of landscape. His canvases have become the leitmotifs of the battlefield, rendering visual the indescribable tragedy of war. This lecture will explore the ‘barren, sightless, godless’ visual language of conflict by contrasting Nash’s work with that of Stanley Spencer, who served first in Bristol as a medical orderly, then on the forgotten front in Salonika. After the war Spencer recreated his memory of war, literally re-membering the dis-membered fragments of the fighting on the walls of the Sandham Chapel in Burghclere, a place ranked alongside the poetry of Owen and Sassoon, and Britten’s War Requiem, as amongst the ‘most moving monuments to 20th-century war.’

Biography:

Professor Paul Gough is a painter, broadcaster and writer. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. His research into the imagery of war and peace has been presented to audiences throughout the world. He has published four books: a monograph on Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere (2006); A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (2010); Your Loving Friend (2011), the edited correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute; and Banksy: the Bristol Legacy (editor, 2012).He is curating a number of exhibitions linked to the Great War in 2014.He is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

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