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Lot Essay
Few moments in Paul Nash’s career carry greater weight than 1936, the year London hosted the International Surrealist Exhibition, a landmark event Nash himself helped organise, and one that placed him, decisively, at the centre of the movement in Britain. Surrealism was not, for Nash, a passing allegiance. It gave him a vocabulary he had been reaching for throughout the 1930s: a way of placing familiar objects into new, charged relationships, and of finding an unexpected peculiarity that he already sensed in the English landscape. Changing Scene, painted in 1937, is a direct product of that vocabulary at its most assured, rooted in a stretch of coast Nash had known intimately since boyhood: Swanage, on the Dorset coast, and the country around it.
In Outline, his autobiography, Nash recalled a boyhood afternoon spent chasing butterflies across the downs, when ‘the still afternoon was disturbed only by the thin cries of the gulls’ and ‘the cliff before me was Ballard Head rising up in majesty over Swanage Bay’ (Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949, p. 121). That attachment deepened, in 1934, into an extended stay at Whitecliff, a farmhouse below Ballard Down lent to Nash and his wife Margaret by their friend Hilda Felce. Nash, already alert to the currents of European Surrealism, quickly recognised something of the same spirit in his surroundings: ‘I began to discover’, he later wrote, ‘that Swanage was definitely, as they say, surrealist’ (‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, The Architectural Review, vol. LXXIX, no. 473, April 1936, pp. 151-154). These were also years of romantic and creative intensity for Nash, who began an affair with fellow Surrealist artist Eileen Agar, whom he met on this same coastline; the exchange of ideas between them fed directly into the strange, poetic imagery Nash was developing throughout the period. It was here, in this brief but extraordinarily fertile period, that some of Nash’s most inventive Surrealist compositions took shape.
Chief among the objects he found there was a porcelain doll’s head, which appears—held in Nash’s own hands—in a photograph of the artist examining it with characteristic curiosity. This same head recurs across several works of the period, among them Environment for Two Objects (1936-1937), where it is set on the shale of Kimmeridge Bay alongside a charred wooden door-handle. Changing Scene returns to the head a year later, now set beside a vase of dried flowers, watching a small figure make its way along the distant slope of the Ballard Cliffs. Andrew Causey has read this scene symbolically, speaking to the depth of private meaning Nash invested in the object: ‘the siren is alone beside dried flowers, which probably represent the decay of her physical beauty, watching the escape of a tiny figure climbing the slope of the Ballard Cliffs’ (Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p. 287).
The head’s precise resonance for Nash has invited further speculation, some seeing in it a trace of his wife Margaret, others of Agar, others still preferring to see it simply as one of the found curiosities Nash collected obsessively along the coast. Irrespective of its meaning, Changing Scene is handled with tenderness rather than menace: in a harmonious range of blues, greys and ochres, its two central elements are enlarged and dignified, like carved pieces set out for a private, unhurried contemplation. This is Surrealism as Nash understood and practised it: not shock for its own sake, but what Lautréamont had called the ‘chance encounter’ of unlikely things, staged here with quiet affection rather than provocation. Changing Scene asks to be read, as Nash’s greatest pictures always do, less as a puzzle to be solved than as a poem: open, suggestive, and drawn from a landscape that had become, by 1937, entirely his own.
In Outline, his autobiography, Nash recalled a boyhood afternoon spent chasing butterflies across the downs, when ‘the still afternoon was disturbed only by the thin cries of the gulls’ and ‘the cliff before me was Ballard Head rising up in majesty over Swanage Bay’ (Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, London, 1949, p. 121). That attachment deepened, in 1934, into an extended stay at Whitecliff, a farmhouse below Ballard Down lent to Nash and his wife Margaret by their friend Hilda Felce. Nash, already alert to the currents of European Surrealism, quickly recognised something of the same spirit in his surroundings: ‘I began to discover’, he later wrote, ‘that Swanage was definitely, as they say, surrealist’ (‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, The Architectural Review, vol. LXXIX, no. 473, April 1936, pp. 151-154). These were also years of romantic and creative intensity for Nash, who began an affair with fellow Surrealist artist Eileen Agar, whom he met on this same coastline; the exchange of ideas between them fed directly into the strange, poetic imagery Nash was developing throughout the period. It was here, in this brief but extraordinarily fertile period, that some of Nash’s most inventive Surrealist compositions took shape.
Chief among the objects he found there was a porcelain doll’s head, which appears—held in Nash’s own hands—in a photograph of the artist examining it with characteristic curiosity. This same head recurs across several works of the period, among them Environment for Two Objects (1936-1937), where it is set on the shale of Kimmeridge Bay alongside a charred wooden door-handle. Changing Scene returns to the head a year later, now set beside a vase of dried flowers, watching a small figure make its way along the distant slope of the Ballard Cliffs. Andrew Causey has read this scene symbolically, speaking to the depth of private meaning Nash invested in the object: ‘the siren is alone beside dried flowers, which probably represent the decay of her physical beauty, watching the escape of a tiny figure climbing the slope of the Ballard Cliffs’ (Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p. 287).
The head’s precise resonance for Nash has invited further speculation, some seeing in it a trace of his wife Margaret, others of Agar, others still preferring to see it simply as one of the found curiosities Nash collected obsessively along the coast. Irrespective of its meaning, Changing Scene is handled with tenderness rather than menace: in a harmonious range of blues, greys and ochres, its two central elements are enlarged and dignified, like carved pieces set out for a private, unhurried contemplation. This is Surrealism as Nash understood and practised it: not shock for its own sake, but what Lautréamont had called the ‘chance encounter’ of unlikely things, staged here with quiet affection rather than provocation. Changing Scene asks to be read, as Nash’s greatest pictures always do, less as a puzzle to be solved than as a poem: open, suggestive, and drawn from a landscape that had become, by 1937, entirely his own.