The Irregularities of Nature

The British neo-romantic movement, covering the period 1930–55, is currently experiencing something of a revival of interest. It has been the subject of several recent exhibitions, showcasing such artists as Edward Bawden, John Craxton, Enid Marx, John Minton, Paul Nash, John Piper and Eric Ravilious.¹ Several of the above were closely connected; in 1925 when Paul Nash was a tutor at the Royal College of Art he observed an ‘outbreak of talent’ among the students, who then included Ravilious, Bawden and Marx.² Certain of them would have an influence on New Zealand painting in the period following World War II. But in Britain, neo-romanticism fell out of favour with the arrival of pop art and American abstract expressionism, and its renewal has been dated to a 1983 exhibition at the National Museum of Wales,³ and subsequent retrospectives of Graham Sutherland (1982) and John Piper (1983–84) at the Tate Gallery.⁴

Although ‘fuelled by nostalgia and inclined towards the melodramatic’,⁵ neo-romanticism was right for the times. It emerged in the 1930s after the conservativism of British art in the years following World War I, and offered a modernist reworking of the landscape tradition. With the growing threat of another war, there was what David Mellor has identified as an ‘apocalyptic mood’ among artists and writers,⁶ and the increasingly isolated British artists were forced to fall back on British art.⁷ There was a new sense of nationalism, expressed in the recording of the national heritage which now appeared under threat of enemy bombing, and neo-romanticism can be seen as a self-protective response to world events.⁸

Central to the movement―and its name―was the rekindled interest in early nineteenth-century romantic watercolourists: Samuel Palmer, William Blake, Henry Fuseli and John Sell Cotman. A series of watercolour exhibitions in London after World War I included Palmer (1926), who had been all but neglected since his death in 1881. His visionary landscapes would now have an impact on such artists as Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash. In the catalogue for a 1938 exhibition in London, Herbert Read wrote that Nash ‘feels poetically where most others calculate’, while reviewer felt he was ‘yielding . More recently, Nash’s watercolours have been recognised as offering ‘a new vision of modernity that was structurally solid but light―like that symbol of twentieth-century progress, the aeroplane’. His visionary approach to landscape, and Sutherland’s metamorphic interpretations, would also incorporate what has been described as a ‘distinctly surrealistic tinge’.