Andrew Causey, who has died aged 74, was a leading historian of 20th-century British art and sculpture. His profound understanding of the relationship between nature, painting and the landscape influenced by a childhood in rural Cornwall informed his writing about artists including Paul Nash, Peter Lanyon, Edward Burra and Ivon Hitchens. He also wrote key texts on land art and the environmental sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy.
From 1971 Andrew published regularly on Nash; he organised a number of exhibitions of his work, including the 1975 Tate retrospective, and in 1980 edited his writings. Andrew found in Nash's work a complex engagement with the relationship between national identity and landscape. Nash was interested in a pre-industrial Britain and in the ancient cultures that had formed the landscape, which made him a natural ally of the surrealists. In his essay, Paul Nash and Englishness, for Tate Liverpool's Paul Nash: Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape (2003), Andrew explored the subtlety of Nash's attempts to combine modernism and Englishness, while avoiding the pitfalls of the picturesque.
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