The human cost of the war can hardly be calculated. Civilian population centres were intentionally targeted by both the Axis and the Allies. Planes of the U.S. Army Air Forcesburned scores of Japanese cities to the ground with incendiary bombs before Hiroshimaand Nagasaki were destroyed with atomic weapons. Japan’s troops in Asia enslaved some 200,000 women to act as sex workers (“comfort women”) and often acted with a general disregard for human life, especially toward prisoners. Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army carried out horrific medical experiments on thousands of prisoners of war and civilians; men and women were subjected to chemical and biological agents and vivisectedto survey the results.

After agreeing to a partition of Poland with Germany, the Soviets slaughtered as many as 20,000 Polish prisoners of war at Katyn. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact guaranteed Soviet hegemony over the Baltic states, and tens of thousands of people were killed or unjustly imprisoned after the Soviets invaded Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The troops of the Red Army used mass 🤬 as a terror tactic as they advanced into Germany; using medical records and written requests for abortions as data points, experts estimated 100,000 women were raped in Berlin alone. Claims of war crimes carried out by the Red Army were generally dismissed by the Soviets as Western propaganda, however. When these actions were acknowledged, the Soviets professed that they were justified given the treatment of Soviet civilians by the Wehrmacht and SS troops.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-War-II-The-horror-of-war-in-pictures-2147312

All of these aspects of Paul Nash’s work are explored in depth in Tate Britain’s vast and definitive exhibition which we saw while in London. It is a huge show of more than 160 works which convincingly presents Nash as not only a war artist of great importance, and a pioneering figure of the British avant-garde in the 1930s, but also as a romantic in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, who, like them, created visionary landscapes drenched in symbolism and painted as if in a dream.

Entering the exhibition, the first words you see are from a poem written by Nash in 1909 for his friend, Mercia Oakley:

In this first room, we are presented with a selection of Nash’s earliest work – drawings and watercolours which sometimes place mysterious figures in indefinable landscape settings or explore the dream-like atmosphere of a moonlit night scene. Perhaps reflecting on ‘The Pyramids in the Sea’, done in ink, chalk and watercolour in 1912, Nash spoke of how ‘my love of the monstrous and the magical led me beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds’.