Vegetation

Ex Libris: the printed image and the art of the book, 2010

While training at the Slade School of Art, Paul Nash paid for his tuition by selling bookplates—small, printed inserts that bore a book owner’s name and which alluded to elements of the owner’s interests and personality. Inspired by poet-painters such as Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Nash’s desire to intermingle art and literature was a quality that informed his work throughout the course of his career.

Recruited by friend and publisher, Oliver Simon, Nash was one of several young artists who came to work for the Curwen Press in the early 1920s, producing, among other things, designs for endpapers and dust jackets. Nash’s first literary project for the press, however, was a series of six illustrations for an edition of Genesis: the first book of the Bible and one that told of the earth’s creation.

In the 1920s, Nash struggled to reconcile abstract and surrealist influences in his work, perceiving the former as a symbol of modernity, the latter as a movement associated with folklore and imagination. Genesis, however, allowed the artist to combine the two influences; as an historical episode not witnessed by man, Nash’s portrayals of the earth’s creation are works of pure imagination—described according to the terse style of modern abstraction.

Abstract 2 appears to derive from Vegetation and may have been submitted by Nash to Curwen as a design for the types of dust jackets and endpapers, already mentioned.

Elspeth Pitt, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs