Page 41 - Studio International - April 1967

Fig. 9
Paul Nash
Kinetic feature 1931
Oil on canvas
26 x 20 in.
Courtesy Tate Gallery
There is an extant
watercolour study for
this painting

teenth exhibition of the 7 & 5 was held at the Zwemmer needed to join. Besides, Nash liked to manage any enter-
Gallery in October 1935. (Fig 11.) Hitchens alone remained prise in which he was involved and Nicholson, whose in-
of the founder members. For an all-British group it was a clinations were similar, was already at the reins of this one.
remarkably challenging exhibition (Winifred Nicholson The most insular of the progressive British painters in
contributed a surprisingly free abstract gouache - Fig 11 the 1920s, Nash was acutely conscious by the end of the
No. 2), but by now the stronger members needed an '20s of the need for a better understanding in England of
international showing. For the following year Nicholson advanced continental painting. The period of transition
had plans to hold an International Exhibition of Abstract in his work came with a series of abstracted compositions
Art under the auspices of the 7 & 5, but the project never painted at the close of the twenties centred on the Urne
materialized. Its place was taken by Nicolete Gray's Buriall illustrations. In the latter the crisis between
`Abstract and Concrete' Exhibition, in which Nicholson, abstract form and metaphysical content becomes acute.
Moore and Hepworth took their rightful place on equal By 1931 Nash was painting what he certainly felt were
terms with European artists of the first rank, twenty-six abstract compositions.6 The 'Kinetic Feature' (Fig 9) was
years after Clive Bell wrote the passage with which I began. the most extreme of these, with its interlocking sculptured
Paul Nash, whose work had made him a highly suitable planes, but even here the column-form remains to lead us
candidate for the 7 & 5 in the late '20s was too well back into the world of ' ... the scattered fragments of my
established-too assured of regular exhibitions-to have own mind, a desert with certain mirages on the horizon of