The Menin Road

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The collection of the Imperial War Museum, London (the UK).

Briefly about the painting: The large painting, almost 6 square meters in size, was ordered by the Committee of British War Memorials for the National Hall of Memory and is considered one of the most iconic images of the First World War. The road was the main route between Ypres and Menin and extended through the places of several fierce battles. Nash combined graphics with a complex color design, creating a kind of anti-hierarchy, where the corners, like the central spaces, contain equally important and disgusting images of the narration. Nash relied on the nearly fifty drawings that he created in those front areas in the year of war events. The modernist distortion of the “phantasmagoric land” merged with the gamut that resembled a Flemish tapestry. W. Lewis called the work “the epic of catastrophe”.