We Are Making a New World

We Are Making a New World is a 1918 oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Nash. The optimistic title contrasts with Nash's depiction of a scarred landscape created by a battle of the First World War, with shell-holes, mounds of earth, and leafless tree trunks. Nash's first major painting and his most famous work, it has been described as one of the best British paintings of the 20th century, and compared to Picasso's Guernica.[1] "Yet it is worth remembering that the picture was a piece of official art and that it first appeared, untitled, as the cover of an issue of British War Artists at the Front, published by Country Life. ... [It] was promulgated in 1917 as covert propaganda for the Allied cause."[2]

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, Imperial War Museum
Sunrise, Inverness Copse, the 1918 drawing on which the painting was based.

The work was among the first oil paintings produced by Nash. It was based on his 1918 pen-and-ink drawing Sunrise, Inverness Copse,[3] which depicts the remains of a small group of trees at Inverness Copse, near Ypres in Belgium.[4] Both works were exhibited in a solo exhibition entitled "The Void of War" at the Leicester Galleries in May 1918.

Nash had signed-up shortly after the outbreak of the First World War with the Artists' Rifles. He transferred to the Hampshire Regiment and was sent to the front at Ypres. He had a passionate attachment to the natural world and regarded with horror the deformation brought about by the war.[5]

In 1917 Nash returned to England having broken several ribs in a fall into a trench.[6] Soon afterwards the Battle of Passchendaele took place which left 200,000 British killed or wounded. Nash lobbied the Foreign Office to be allowed to return to the front as an official war artist. He wrote to his wife Margaret : "I am no longer an artist...I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever..."[5]

The painting measures 71.1 by 91.4 centimetres (28.0 in × 36.0 in). It depicts a bright white sun rising above ruddy brown clouds, shining beams onto a desolated green landscape below, with unnatural mounds of earth piled up between the skeletal remains of blasted trees. Nash's style is developed from Cubism and Vorticism.

References
  1. Prospect Magazine, 19 March 2010 Private view: Paul Nash
  2. Reynolds, David, 2013, The Long Shadow, p.173
  3. iwm.org collections We are Making a New World,
  4. Imperial War Museum iwm.org Sunrise, Inverness Copse, Imperial War Museum
  5. Andrew Graham Dixon, Radio Times, 13-19 September 2014
  6. Tate.org Paul Nash: Modern artist, ancient landscape: Room guide: World War I, Tate Gallery
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