The artist Paul Nash made Genesis, a small book of woodcuts set alongside biblical text, in 1924. Archives and museums all over the world own a copy. The book was printed by Nonesuch Press — founded in the early 1920s by socialists and bisexuals in a basement in London’s Soho — with a clothbound cover, gilt lettering, and twelve woodcuts. It’s a large book, a bit grand. Nonesuch wanted to make beautifully designed books less precious and more available; they typically used a commercial printer, but mimicked the handpress aesthetic.

On each opposing page to Nash’s woodcuts are brief quotes from the Bible’s creation story, printed in Neuland font, which was then avant-garde but now unfortunately conjures an advert for The Lion King. The wonderful thing about the Genesis story is how long it takes to get to the humans, and the same is true of Nash’s woodcuts. The book begins with the separation of lightness from darkness, a process the artist renders as angular static, as if light and dark were tediously commingled.

The abstracted compositions are tight and dense, even claustrophobic; the perspective angle too close for comfort. “The Creation of the Firmament” is a whoosh of looping circles as tall as the page, and land erupts as a spiky mountain range. The birds madly swarm; the trees are the redwood kind, impossibly tall and towering. Nash’s stars are not petite twinkles, but fireworks scratched out like blossoms on cut-glass crystal. The creation of the world in Nash’s Genesis is a jerky, frightening cataclysm — the miracle being not what God made, but that something was made at all. To choose Genesis as source material, a drama of something breaking the surface of nothing, is to show deference to the fact of nothingness: the impregnable aloneness; the dry, matte vastness. This artist lived in close proximity to the empty maw.

Nash is best known for his ghoulish paintings of World War I, of landscapes mangled by battle. He was an infantry man, but after injury he was recruited as an official war artist. His savaged landscapes are among the war’s most iconic images. The trees are jaggedly broken, their greenery stripped by bullets and cannons, and tangled below are lairs of barbed wire, corpses, ramparts and footbridges smashed and discarded, bogs of foul water — all rendered in an uncouth mucky palette.

After World War I ended, however, Nash struggled to make a living. The problem wasn’t his talent, but the fact that his talent had been employed, his detractors argued, to aid the war machine. The intellectuals of the day classified Nash’s paintings as propaganda, and thus undeserving of serious consideration. The eminent critic Roger Fry was especially scorching. Fry used his considerable influence among collectors to “starve Paul out”, according to Nash’s wife. The painter pursued other means to stay afloat — commercial work, art reviews, theater design — all of which, for one reason or another, came to a dead end.

In addition to Nash’s financial struggles, he experienced a series of grave personal misfortunes in the years immediately following the war. In 1921, he witnessed his father collapse from a heart attack. The father lived, but Nash slipped into a coma for more than a week, which his doctor attributed to emotional shock. (Nash had earlier attended the deathbed of his mother, who died of anorexia before the war.) His wife, Maragaret Odeh or “Bunty”, suffered a dire miscarriage that resulted in permanent fertility loss, and Nash continued to battle severe asthma, the same disease that eventually killed him. Also in 1921, a good friend, the artist and author Claud Lovat Fraser, came for a visit, fell seriously ill, and suddenly died. Before and after and during all this, Nash endured the symptoms of what is now called PTSD, his mind constantly flashing a series of ghastly images.

When Nash made Genesis the war was six years in the past, but the trauma was not. He began experimenting with woodcuts around 1920, after awakening from his coma. Nash had been ordered not to work, but woodcuts were apparently permissible — it was a new medium for him and the stakes were low. He and Bunty moved to a cottage, and Nash joined, with his brother, artist John Nash, the nascent Society of Wood Engravers. He later wrote of this period, “New life in a different world. New kinds of work. Wood engraving. Writing articles, designing textiles, snares of journalism. The friendship of [Walter] Sickert. Arnold Bennett proposes a magazine. I escape the trap.”

Nash’s first successful woodcuts were illustrations to Places, a book of his own poetry, to which he’d turned after repudiating criticism. That same year, in 1922, he also completed a self-portrait, considered to be one of his finest engravings. Portrait of Proud Paul shows a man sitting neither straight nor at ease; the shoulders are relaxed but the throat stiff. The features of Nash’s face — the hood of the eyes, the scalloped hairline, the nose’s slant — are rendered with bracing economy. Nash had struggled in art school with figurative drawing and been painfully criticized; the portrait seems a rejoinder, and also a deft step toward the abstracted style he further developed in Genesis.

There’s no record if Nash was pleased with the book. He wrote an autobiography, Outline, but it ends abruptly in 1914, with a chapter titled “End of a World”. The artist’s surviving letters suggest that Nash’s attention quickly alighted elsewhere: a Giorgio de Chirico exhibition, a meeting with Max Ernst, a camera, George Bataille’s magazine Documents, and then, another war, and another set of war paintings.

Below you will find ten plates from Nash’s Genesis, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. The first and final plate are sadly missing.