Paul Nash’s The Menin Road: Finding a Way Through

Where is the road?

Broken trees rise above pools of pale water. Two soldiers near the middle pick their way through the wreckage, with a smaller pair farther back. Paul Nash’s The Menin Road makes a simple looking task difficult: follow the road across the picture without losing it among the holes and fallen material.

Imperial War Museums records the work as an oil painting on canvas, dated 1919. The canvas measures 182.8 by 317.5 centimetres, and its catalogue number is Art.IWM ART 2242. Nash worked on the painting from June 1918 to February 1919. ^[1]

Begin with the soldiers

Find the two figures nearest the centre. They are small beside the trunks, but their bodies give us a scale for the ground around them. Follow the direction of their legs, then look for a clear stretch of road ahead.

The museum describes soldiers trying to follow a road damaged almost beyond recognition. Its account names flooded trenches and rain-filled shell holes among the shattered trees. ^[1] Now try to connect one patch of open ground with the next. Where does water interrupt the route, and where does the route disappear behind debris?

Water that holds the trees

Look at the broad pool in the foreground. Dark vertical reflections extend down into it, while the broken shapes around its edges keep the surface from feeling restful. Smaller pools repeat farther into the picture.

Compare a standing trunk with its reflection. Then compare the pale water with the pale openings in the sky. Similar colours appear above and below the battlefield, but moving between them takes the eye through a dense mass of broken ground.

A sky cut by light

Diagonal bands of light descend from the left. Their direction crosses the upright trees and the irregular shapes below. At the right, light opens around a dense group of bare trunks.

Tate’s exhibition guide describes Nash’s growing interest in using geometric forms to unify The Menin Road. ^[5] Trace the diagonals across the sky, then compare them with the vertical trees and the angled pieces in the foreground. The shapes draw the picture together even while its subject shows a place torn apart.

A memorial that was never built

The Ministry of Information commissioned the painting in April 1918 for a proposed Hall of Remembrance. Imperial War Museums explains that the project would bring together paintings of the war at the front and at home. The hall was never built, and the museum became the custodian of the collection. ^[1][2]

The intended scale looked back to European battle painting. The museum’s label connects the dimensions chosen for the scheme with Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery. It describes an ambition to commemorate heroism and sacrifice. ^[1] Return to Nash’s picture with that purpose in mind. How much room does it give its soldiers, and how much does it give the damaged earth?

A particular place, a wider memory

The painting was originally to be called A Flanders Battlefield. In her account of the archives, IWM curator Alexandra Walton reproduces Nash’s proposed inscription identifying country near Gheluvelt, in the district of Tower Hamlets. She gives the archive reference ART/WA1/490 to 525. ^[3]

Jenny Uglow reads The Menin Road and We Are Making a New World as carrying a lasting sense of horror and shame. ^[4] Her response gives us another way to approach the contrast between the picture’s carefully arranged forms and the devastation they describe.

Look back to the soldiers. The wide canvas allows the eye to travel across the battlefield, but it gives the figures no easy passage through it. Try the road once more, starting at the foreground and moving towards the distant trees.