In the avant-garde English journal Axis no 8 for Early Winter 1937, Paul Nash's object Burnt Offering was reproduced - one of the few images we have of his objects, once quite numerous but now virtually all disappeared. Burnt Offering seems to be a composite object, with what appears to be a turned wooden finial (upside down) or door handle partially destroyed by fire fixed to a concrete or stone base with markings and encrustations that make it look as if it had long been submerged in the sea.

Nash's objects were a major presence in the surrealist exhibitions in England in the 1930s. At the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries he showed two objects - untitled, but described as "Designed Object", and one "Found Object Interpreted" whose medium was given as "Vegetable Kingdom" (Marsh Personage).  Burnt Offering was also shown at the London Gallery exhibition "Surrealist Objects and Poems" (1937). As Michel Remy says, "Hardly any exhibit has survived from the exhibition", (so far as we know). True to the complexity of the surrealist interest in the object, fifteen categories of object were listed in the catalogue; in "Surrealist objects" Nash exhibited Homes without Hands and Forest; in "Found Objects" Long-gom-pa ("a five-branch root named after a Tibetan runner famous at the time" (Remy); in "Found Objects Interpreted" Goodness How Sad, Encounter of Wild Stones, Not Cricket and Nest of Wild Stones; in "Objects Collages", Aquarium and Only Egg; in "Oneiric Objects" Tree Man; in "Objects for Everyday Use" (with Margaret Nash) Basket for Found Objects; Burnt Offering in "Perturbed Objects"; Moon Aviary in "Constructed Objects".

For the Cambridge University Arts Society "Exhibition of Surrealism" (1937) he showed three: Only Egg, The Nest of Wild Stones and Long-gom-pa. In the same exhibition Eileen Agar showed Le père Ubu. In 1938, following the great success of the London International Surrealist Exhibition, Nash showed several works, including Objets aux champs and Objets balancés (probably photographs rather than actual objects, the latter possibly Poised objects [Causey 1973 pl. 27].)

Of the twenty-five or so known and named objects, most were dismantled, scrapped, "not made" or have simply melted away. Forest from Roland Penrose's collection (trees made from glove stretchers) and Only Egg "seem to be the only two objects by Nash to have survived", according to the catalogue raisonné. As the Tate catalogue entry for Nash's important photomontage/drawing Swanage, c. 1936 says, "Almost none of these objects survives except as depicted in Nash's work, though he apparently continued to keep and collect objects until his death".

It is therefore extraordinarily difficult to place the object in question with any certainty although there is plenty of leeway for the existence of a hitherto unknown "found object" - or possibly "found object interpreted". A typewritten label on the back of the object gives the title "Seagull Eye Wind Waves" and an address for Paul Nash: Whitecliffe Farm, near Swanage, which is where he lived from October 1934 until he moved to the centre of Swanage in 1935. In March 1936 the Nashes left Swanage. So the object (or its collection) would date from roughly the same period as Marsh personage, his first found object, which in some respects, especially visually, it resembles.

Whereas Marsh Personage and Long-gom-pa are clearly found "natural" objects, (the latter furze-wood, the former driftwood, "salvaged from a stream", and the first of the found "vegetable" objects), Seagull Eye Wind Waves is "interpreted" and worked on. It is composed of three pieces of wood, each with a strong character: the thickly gnarled outer rim of a hollow tree, which embraces a curved form, perhaps once part of a piece of furniture. This has been carved to enhance its resemblance to outspread seagull wings, and the tip of the top wing becomes a bird head; through a hole in the top of this shape runs a thin, antler-like branch. Perhaps this worn forked stick that has pierced the wooden curve was encountered thus in a curious natural formation, and the curve was then interpreted as wings and the bird's head, crudely carved. Gashes and striations in the side of the wooden base, some circling knots in the wood, some indicating the lines of a torso, must belong to the same intervention. It might have been worked by Nash, or found by him as a piece of rough carving, a kind of primitive interpretation by an unknown hand, with a sense of the phallic and sexual suggestions in the lump of wood and its odd impaling. This would be wholly in line with surrealist taste and there are plenty of examples of such finds. For example the construction made by an aliéné, (a frame filled with broken scissors and other sharp implements) found and exhibited by André Breton. This rural find by Nash is in line with his profound love of the natural world and its innumerable forms. He wrote in Axis (January 1935) "...I find I still need partially organic features to make my fixed, conceptual image. I discern among natural phenomena a thousand forms which might, with advantage, be dissolved in the crucible of abstract transfiguration; but the hard cold stone, the rasping grass, the intricate architecture of trees and waves, or the brittle sculpture of a dead leaf - I cannot translate altogether beyond their own image, without suffering in spirit. My aim in symbolical representation and abstraction, although governed by a purpose with a formal ideal in view, seeks always to give life to a conception within the formal shell..." In my opinion Seagull Eye Wind Waves is a found interpreted object by Paul Nash.

Professor Dawn Ades

Causey, Andrew and Eates, Margot Paul Nash Paintings and Watercolours Tate 1975

Causey, Andrew Paul Nash's Photographs, Document and Image Tate 1973

Evans, Myfanwy "Paul Nash 1937" Axis no 8 Early Winter 1937

Exposition internationale du surréalisme Exb. cat. Galerie Beaux-arts Paris 1938

Exposition surréaliste d'objets Exb. cat. Charles Ratton Paris 1936

Jenkins, David Fraser Paul Nash, The Elements Dulwich Picture Gallery 2010

Montagu, Jemima (ed.) Paul Nash, Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape Tate 2003

Nash, Paul "For, but not with" Axis 1 January 1935

Nash, Paul "Swanage or Seaside Surrealism" Architectural Review November 1936

Nash, Paul "The Object", Architectural Review November 1936

Nash, Paul Fertile Image Ed Margaret Nash [1951] 1975

Nash, Paul Writings on Art ed. Andrew Causey Oxford 2000

Paul Nash, Places Exb. cat. South Bank Centre 1989

Read, Herbert (ed.) Surrealism 1936

Remy, Michel Surrealism in Britain Ashgate 1999

Surrealism Exb. Cat. Cambridge University Arts Society 1937

Surrealist Objects and Poems London Gallery Ltd. 1937

The International Surrealist Exhibition New Burlington Galleries Exb Cat. 1936

The London Bulletin 1938-1940

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Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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