Battle of Germany

image: An abstract aerial view of a bombing raid on a city.

This work was commissioned by the WAAC in 1944 and was originally intended to depict a flying bomb. In a letter to Clare Neilson on 5 September 1944, Nash described that 'K. Clark wanted me to do a sequel to 'Battle of Britain' on the flying bomb but it has fallen through I think. I did not find any point of departure, no bomb site as it were to launch into a composition. Besides I can think of nothing but my invasion painting which is now in its critical stage.' The 'invasion painting' is probably 'Battle of Germany' which was delivered to the WAAC in September 1944. Nash wrote a text to accompany the painting: '...The moment of the picture is when the city, lying under the uncertain light of the moon, awaits the blow at its heart. In the background, a gigantic column of smoke arises from the recent destruction of an outlying factory which is still fiercely burning. These two objects pillar and moon seem to threaten the city no less than the flights of bombers even now towering in the red sky. The moon's illumination reveals the form of the city but with the smoke pillar's increasing height and width, throws also its largening shadow nearer and nearer. In contrast to the suspense of the waiting city under the quiet though baleful moon, the other half of the picture shows the opening of the bombardment. The entire area of sky and background and part of the middle distance are violently agitated. Here forms are used quite arbitrarily and colours by a kind of chromatic percussion with one purpose, to suggest explosion and detonation. In the central foreground the group of floating discs descending may be a part of a flight of paratroops or the crews of aircraft forced to bale out.' Kenneth Clark, Chairman of the WAAC, reacted positively to the painting but was concerned at the complexity of its meaning.

'What the body is denied the mind must achieve' Paul Nash in his essay Aerial Flowers, 1944 In 1944 Nash had never flown in a plane and, suffering from severe asthma, was now too ill to do so. Intrigued with the idea of flying and the dreams he had experienced since childhood, he based this painting on his imaginings, as well as aerial photographs. To Nash's mind the noisy and cramped reality of 'heavier-than-air' flight could never match his fantasy that flying would be silent and instinctive, like swimming. Nash's ambitious late painting represents a gathering of ideas. The viewer follows the bomber's approach to the target, over the flattened landscape below, to the column of smoke hanging above the city. Nash saw fungal shapes, one of many recurring motifs in his work, as poetic representations of death but also rebirth. Here, some resemble explosions, prefiguring the atomic mushroom cloud. Others signify parachutes, referencing Nash's fascination with the term the rose of death, first used during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) to describe the sight of parachutes 'blossoming' in the sky.

War Artists Advisory Committee commission

Paul Nash