Victor Pasmore: Line & Space

VICTOR PASMORE LINE & SPACE

A selection of works from the retrospective exhibition shown at Hastings Contemporary, 29 April – 31 October 2020

VICTOR PASMORE LINE & SPACE 12 April – 4 June 2021

in association with

FOREWORD Elizabeth Gilmore, Director Hastings Contemporary

“I simply put something down and start from there, and see what happens… I simply let the painting do the talking.”

Victor Pasmore’s words have such resonance for us at Hastings Contemporary, reflecting our commitment to supporting artists and the creative process, and the ethos of our newly expanded, international programme of contemporary and modern art.

Pasmore is widely recognised as a major figure in the international abstract movement, his wide-ranging retrospective in Hastings and the more focused exhibition at Marlborough London being a chance to take stock of the artist’s incredibly versatile output over his long career.

The momentum to put together this full retrospective was ignited by the rediscovery of three abstract works in the garage of his family home which form the centre piece of this exhibition.

Made between 1960-65, the clarity and simplicity of their form and colour palette combine with Pasmore’s characteristically instinctive touch.

From the earliest surviving works of lyrical landscapes and figurative paintings, produced while he was a student at Harrow School and then as a young artist attending evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, to his experiments with constructivist sculpture, spray painting, collage and Perspex, all the way to the recently discovered work made close to his death in 1998, Pasmore’s works reflect and anticipate the major changes that occurred in Western European art and art practice throughout the twentieth century.

It is perhaps the scale and boldness of Pasmore’s oeuvre that is most striking and was described by former Tate Director, Alan Bowness, as “a succession of metamorphoses that have at various times dismayed, astonished and delighted his admirers”. Yet also, in all its diversity, his work remains fresh and relevant today, and continues to inspire generations of artists.

We are very grateful for the assistance of Frankie Rossi at Marlborough and the Pasmore family, whose commitment and creative generosity have made this important exhibition possible.

VICTOR PASMORE: A PECULIAR BEAUTY Chris Stephens, Director Holburne Museum, Bath Text updated from Victor Pasmore: A Peculiar Beauty, 2019

One of the thrills of being a curator, as opposed to any other sort of art historian, is that one has the opportunity to bring about and to see the revelations that result from bringing one object in close physical relation to another.

To select an exhibition, or to hang a gallery, is as much an act of investigation itself as it is the outcome of research.

In my experience, this was most forcibly brought home when I had the privilege of hanging a display of Victor Pasmore’s work at Tate Britain in celebration of the artist’s centenary in 2008. At the beginning of my career at the Tate, in the mid-1990s, I had catalogued in detail the Gallery’s collection of Pasmore paintings, reliefs and constructions. As well as briefly meeting Victor himself, a year or so before he died, this project offered the opportunity of looking closely, researching and thinking in depth about each of the individual works as well as the artist’s career more broadly. With my colleague, I closely scrutinised each of the works in the Tate’s collection.

In particular, alerted by our knowledge of Victor’s theoretical interests and one or two books that had influenced him, we measured the works, observing the geometry that seemed to underlie most of their compositions. Geometrical formulae, and in particular the Golden Section, appeared again and again in the pictures’ make-up, one or two of the paintings even having those proportions measured out at the edges of the canvas. We drove our editor mad with our apparent obsession with the Golden Section. He, in turn, drove us mad with his insistence on identifying the exact spot from which Pasmore must have looked west from Hammersmith to Chiswick to have composed The Quiet River, perhaps the most sublimely beautiful of his Thames paintings. Much to my annoyance and surprise, having stomped down to Hammersmith one gloriously sunny afternoon, I found it was possible to find a spot on the riverbank that afforded exactly the view in the painting. With a further visit to the local archive, I was also able to establish that, despite all the mysterious poetry of the misty sunset with its phantasmal figures, many of Pasmore’s forms could be precisely identified: the twin masts of a ship moored permanently on the north side of Chiswick Eyot, for example,

“ALL ART IS THE SEARCH FOR THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL.” Victor Pasmore, 1964

or the protruding canopy of the malt factory, on the right-hand

by Clark. Explaining to the Art Gallery of South Australia why

edge, the smell from which then dominated the riverside.

he proposed for acquisition so many paintings by Pasmore,

Empirical, visual facts and flights of the imagination co-habit comfortably, naturally, in Pasmore’s art. This is nicely illustrated by one of the many great, early works that once belonged to Pasmore’s foremost patron Kenneth Clark. The small 1945 Penguin Modern Painters book on the artist, with an introduction by Clive Bell, includes Clark’s A Winter Morning, 1944, one of numerous paintings Pasmore made based on his garden at Hammersmith Terrace. The 1980 catalogue raisonné reproduces a painting – The Bird Garden: Winter Morning, 1944-6 – which, though clearly different, seems to share certain identical details. The explanation, I discovered, is that a couple of years after Clark bought the painting, Victor borrowed it back and, when it was returned, it transpired that he had reworked the picture, removing a number of the more mundane details, adding some elements and, most fundamentally, turning the whole into a snow scene. Observed reality and artistic construction compete or converge in Pasmore’s art, and that is as true for the abstract work as it is for the representational.

Clark wrote that he believed him to be one of the two or three most important British painters of the twentieth-century but added, pointedly, that he doubted the artist would ever produce such good work again. Pasmore, in this narrative, had shifted camp and abandoned a representational art that drew on the paintings of the past for a constructivist utopia that continued the ideals of the 1930s into the 1950s. The problem with this story is twofold. Firstly, by rightly seeking to position Pasmore in an international movement, critics and historians risked reinforcing the idea of British belatedness.

Despite attempts in recent years to draw parallels between constructivist abstraction in Britain and in Latin America, this view persists, I fear. Secondly, this Pauline view of Pasmore’s development obscures the essential, personal qualities that continue in his art from before the Damascene conversion through to the decades afterwards.

When I planned that centenary display of all of the Tate’s Pasmore paintings and reliefs in a single space, I imagined having to hang the room chronologically so that a visitor, as they passed through the room, would journey from the

That Pasmore ‘going abstract’ in the late 1940s marked a key

atmospheric interior of Lamplight of 1941 to the organic

moment in modern British art history has become a cliché.

abstraction of the spray-painted Green Earth, 1979-80. This

It was grabbed, I suspect, by the advocates of a modernist

room would hinge around some invisible line across the middle

abstraction, notably Herbert Read, as a symbol of their victory

where the stylised landscapes of 1950 interleaved with the

over those fighting for a more moderate modern figuration, led

Picasso-esque abstract collages of a year earlier; or should

“OBSERVED REALITY AND ARTISTIC CONSTRUCTION COMPETE OR CONVERGE IN PASMORE’S ART, AND THAT IS AS TRUE FOR THE ABSTRACT WORK AS IT IS FOR THE REPRESENTATIONAL.” Chris Stephens, 2019

Indeed, as the selection of works in this exhibition makes clear, it was in the 1960s that Pasmore seems to have accepted the consistency running through his work and capitalised upon it. A profile in the May 1964 edition of the Studio magazine recorded his return to painting, the artist noting that he now recognised that he was at heart a painter – not a sculptor or an architect (though he had been designing an area of Peterlee New Town for some years by then) – and that ‘virtually all the elements of my later stages’ could be seen in his early landscapes. In a small space of time, around 1964/5, we see Pasmore working with paint, making constructions with elements that project out towards the viewer or which reach down or across beyond the edge of the backboard, and reprising some of his earlier constructed forms. He seems to play with this new eclecticism: he paints on plywood, leaving the support visible so that the painting appears like a construction (an effect enhanced when he bends the board); he begins to combine the new painting style of organic masses of colour with constructed elements; he progresses from the constructions that reach out horizontally by painting forms which exceed the edges of their support, drawing a meandering line from the painted board, over its edge and on to

one hang it linearly, so that a visitor walked around the room,

the backboard, in a work like Linear Image with Five Colours, as

not through it? In the event, when the works were all brought

if interpreting literally Paul Klee’s idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’.

together in the same room, the great revelation was that this notion of a fundamental divide was complete nonsense.

It became immediately apparent that all of the works, whether painted with brush or spray-can, even if painted or constructed, in wood, Perspex or Formica, sat comfortably together because they shared the same principles and the same sensibility. It is, no doubt, a revelation that would have been obvious to Victor and, perhaps, to any artist.

So Pasmore, in the 1960s, synthesised different elements of his art. Underlying compositional principles and a dynamic but managed asymmetry that seems to confound those principles are two of the characteristics that run through all of that work.

More significant and distinctive, however, is something less definable, more poetic which unites everything he made.

Terry Frost once told me how Pasmore had drummed the importance of the Golden Section into him as a student at

Each of the works has an internal dynamic, based on but not

Camberwell in the late 1940s, adding that only late in life had

strictly dictated by theories of geometry. We know Pasmore

Pasmore realised that the ratio he had been using for most

was reading such texts as Jay Hambidge’s The Elements of

of his career was actually slightly wrong. Frost’s anecdotes

Dynamic Symmetry after it was republished in 1948 but it is

were famously more amusing than they were accurate but

clear he used geometrical proportions to compose his work

it is the case, in my experience, that the geometric relations

earlier than that. To these theories of geometry and proportion

in Pasmore’s compositions are often almost, but not quite,

was added his study of theories of growth, in particular the

precise. For all his fascination with theory and his use of

writing of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose On Growth

geometry, Pasmore was first and foremost an intuitive

and Form had been embraced by numerous artists following

artist. While drawing upon such formal disciplines and

its republication during the war. Thompson’s account of the

fundamental notions, he recognised the primary importance

way a ‘peculiar beauty’ resulted from the natural, incremental

of the individual touch of the artist. And what a touch he

development of organic form, informed the nature of

had! Whether the gentle dab of oil paint, the cutting of a line

Pasmore’s constructions and, later, those paintings in which

through Formica or the placement of an elongated member

the composition appears to have been determined by a

protruding over the edge of a relief, every move Pasmore made

progressive development from or around a single element

embodies his quirky and wholly distinctive sensibility. He might

as epitomised in the newly-uncovered mural that he made

have based his works on those theories and rules but he knew

for his 1965 Tate retrospective.

he could improve upon them with his instinctive poet’s eye.

LIST OF WORKS

Farleigh Church in Spring, 1926 oil on panel 31.1 x 43.9 cm Portrait Sketch: Florence Head, 1935 oil on canvas 45.7 x 35.5 cm Girl with a Hand Mirror, 1938 oil on canvas 61 x 50.8 cm Girl Combing Her Hair (The Artist’s Wife), c. 1940 oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm Lily, 1941 oil on canvas 51 x 30.5 cm Miss Humphries, 1944 oil on canvas 50.8 x 40.7 cm Abstract in White, Black, Brown and Ochre, 1950 collage 40 x 38.4 cm

Abstract in White, Black and Maroon, 1962 projective relief, paint on curved wood and plastic 61 x 121.9 x 21.5 cm Linear Composition, 1962-65 pencil and gravure on board 152.5 x 152.5 cm Blue Development, 1965 oil on board 152.5 x 152.5 cm Abstract in Black, White and Mahogany, 1965-66 projective relief, paint on wood and plastic 122 x 122 x 36 cm Points of Contact, Green Development, 1966 projective relief, oil on plastic and wood 123 x 123 x 27.5 cm Grey Symphony, 1968-77 oil on board 240 x 183 cm Private Collection

Linear Construction, 1969 oil on plywood 152.5 x 152.5 cm Private Collection Square Image, 1971 projective relief, paint on board 80.5 x 80.5 cm Green Development, 1969 oil on curved plywood 122 x 50.8 cm Private Collection Black Rhythm, 1976-77 projective relief, paint on wood 136.5 x 51 cm Brown Symphony, 1979 oil on board 75.5 x 211 cm The Milky Way, 1987 paint on board 122 x 365.8 cm

Green Development in Two Movements, 1989 oil and spray paint on board 183 x 122 cm Voice of the Ocean, 1989 paint on panel 243.8 x 122 cm Now That You Have Reached the Sky, 1993 oil and pencil on board 243.8 x 121.9 cm Untitled, 1993 oil, spray paint and pencil on board 121.9 x 243.8 cm Untitled, 1996 oil, spray paint and pencil on board 121.9 x 121.9 cm Untitled, c. 1996 oil spray paint and charcoal on board 121.9 x 213.3 cm

Farleigh Church in Spring, 1926 oil on panel 31.1 x 43.9 cm

Portrait Sketch: Florence Head, 1935 oil on canvas 45.7 x 35.5 cm

Girl with a Hand Mirror, 1938 oil on canvas 61 x 50.8 cm

Girl Combing Her Hair (The Artist’s Wife), c. 1940 oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm

Lily, 1941 oil on canvas 51 x 30.5 cm

Miss Humphries, 1944 oil on canvas 50.8 x 40.7 cm

Abstract in White, Black, Brown and Ochre, 1950 collage 40 x 38.4 cm

Abstract in White, Black and Maroon, 1962 projective relief, paint on curved wood and plastic 61 x 121.9 x 21.5 cm

Linear Composition, 1962-65 pencil and gravure on board 152.5 x 152.5 cm

Blue Development, 1965 oil on board 152.5 x 152.5 cm

Abstract in Black, White and Mahogany, 1965-66 projective relief, paint on wood and plastic 122 x 122 x 36 cm

Points of Contact, Green Development, 1966 projective relief, oil on plastic and wood 123 x 123 x 27.5 cm

Grey Symphony, 1968-77 oil on board 240 x 183 cm Private Collection

Linear Construction, 1969 oil on plywood 152.5 x 152.5 cm Private Collection

Square Image, 1971 projective relief, paint on board 80.5 x 80.5 cm

Green Development, 1969 oil on curved plywood 122 x 50.8 cm Private Collection

Black Rhythm, 1976-77 projective relief, paint on wood 136.5 x 51 cm

Brown Symphony, 1979 oil on board 75.5 x 211 cm

The Milky Way, 1987 paint on board 122 x 365.8 cm

Green Development in Two Movements, 1989 oil and spray paint on board 183 x 122 cm

Voice of the Ocean, 1989 paint on panel 243.8 x 122 cm

Now That You Have Reached the Sky, 1993 oil and pencil on board 243.8 x 121.9 cm

Untitled, 1993 oil, spray paint and pencil on board 121.9 x 243.8 cm

Untitled, 1996 oil, spray paint and pencil on board 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Untitled, c. 1996 oil spray paint and charcoal on board 121.9 x 213.3 cm

BIOGRAPHY 1908

Born in Surrey, UK

1998

Died in Malta

EDUCATION 1923-26

Studied at Harrow Art School, London, United Kingdom

1927-32

Studied at Central School of Arts and Design, London, United Kingdom

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020-21

Victor Pasmore: Line & Space, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, United Kingdom; travelled to Marlborough, London, United Kingdom

2019

Victor Pasmore: Space as Motif (Works from 1960-1970), Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

2017

Victor Pasmore: Between Risk and Equilibrium, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

2016-17

Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality, Djanogly Galley, Nottingham, United Kingdom; travelled to Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, United Kingdom

2015

Victor Pasmore in Three Dimensions, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

2011-12

Victor Pasmore: From Constructions to Spray Paint, New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury, United Kingdom

2008

Victor Pasmore: Centenary Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

2004

Victor Pasmore: Constructions, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

2001

Victor Pasmore: A Print Retrospective, 1951-1997, Marlborough Graphics, London, United Kingdom

1999-2000

Victor Pasmore: Changing the Process of Painting, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

1999

Victor Pasmore, 1908-1998: Memorial Retrospective Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

1996

1962

1995

1961

1992

1960

1990-91

Victor Pasmore: Paintings and Constructions, XXX Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

Visual Music: Victor Pasmore, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, United Kingdom Victor Pasmore New Work: Paintings, Etchings and Lithographs, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom Victor Pasmore, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, United Kingdom Victor Pasmore: Nature into Art. Paintings and Constructions, 1940-1990, Center for International Arts, New York, United States; travelled to Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1988-89

Retrospective Exhibition, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, United States; travelled to Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., United States

1986

Victor Pasmore: Graphics Exhibition, Galleria 2RC, Rome, Italy

Retrospective Exhibition, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, Germany Victor Pasmore: Recent Paintings and Constructions, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, United Kingdom Solo Exhibition, Victor Pasmore, 1958-60, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

1958

Basic Forms: New Paintings and Constructions, O’Hana Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1955

Retrospective Exhibition: Selected Works, 1926-54, Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge, United Kingdom

1954

Victor Pasmore, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

Victor Pasmore, Paintings and Constructions, 1944-54, ICA Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1980

1953

Victor Pasmore, Arts Council Retrospective Exhibition, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, United Kingdom; toured Great Britain The Green Earth: New Paintings and Graphic Works, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

1977

The Image Within: Recent Works 1974-77, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

1974

Graphics Exhibition, Galleria 2RC, Rome, Italy Victor Pasmore, Galerie Farber, Brussels, Belgium

1969

The Space Within: New Paintings 1968-69, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

1968

Victor Pasmore: Recent Work, Redfern Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1949

Victor Pasmore, Recent Paintings 1948-49, Redfern Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1948

Abstract and other Paintings by Victor Pasmore, Redfern Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1943

Solo Exhibition, Redfern Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1933

Solo Exhibition, Association's Cooling Gallery, London, United Kingdom

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Paintings and Constructions 1960-1967, Graphics 1965-1967, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, United Kingdom; travelled to Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

2013

1967

Concrete Parallels, Centro Brasileiro Britânico, São Paulo, Brazil

Solo Exhibition, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, United States Victor Pasmore, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

1966

Victor Pasmore, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

1965

Victor Pasmore: Retrospective Exhibition 1925-65, Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1964

Victor Pasmore, Galleria Lorenzelli, Milan, Italy Victor Pasmore, Marlborough Fine Art, London, United Kingdom

Basic Design, Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom; travelled to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

2012

2011

Let us Face the Future: British Art 1945-1968, The Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain

2008

Unpopular Culture, Curated by Grayson Perry, De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill, United Kingdom

2007

Towards a Rational Aesthetic: Constructive Art in Post-War Britain, Osbourne Samuel Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2006

Concrete Thoughts: Modern Architecture and Contemporary Art, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

2003

Blast to Freeze: British Art in the Twentieth Century, Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany

1985

St Ives 1939-64, Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1968

Relief/Construction/Relief, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, United States

1967

Recent British Painting, Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1965

The Artist and his Environment: Alan Davie, Merlyn Evans, Ivon Hitchens and Victor Pasmore, 8th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil

1964

Documenta II, Kassel, Germany Paintings and Sculpture of a Decade, 1954-64, Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1963

Victor Pasmore and William Scott, Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland

1961

Bewogen Beweging, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1939

Contemporary British Art, British Pavilion, Wold Fair, New York, United States

1934

Objective Abstractions, Zwemmer Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1930

XVII Artists, Zwemmer Gallery, London, United Kingdom

AWARDS/RESIDENCIES 1983

Elected Senior Royal Academician, The Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom

1977

Awarded Grid Prix d’Honneur for prints at International Graphics Exhibition, Ljubljana, Slovenia

1964

Awarded Carnegie Prize for painting, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United Stated

1963

Appointed Trustee of the Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1959

Awarded CBE

TEACHING APPOINTMENTS 1954-61

1959

Appointed Master of Painting at King’s College, Durham University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

The Developing Process: Work in Progress towards a New Foundation of Art Teaching, ICA, London, United Kingdom

1942

Documenta II, Kassel, Germany

1957

An Exhibit: Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; travelled to ICA, London, United Kingdom Statements: A Review of British Abstract Art in 1956, ICA, London, United Kingdom

1956

Masters of British Painting 1800-1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States Group 7, This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom

1952

Adams, Blow, Paolozzi, Pasmore, Galleria Origine, Rome, Italy

1951

British Paintings 1925-1950, New Burlington Gallery, London, United Kingdom Aspects of British Art, ICA, London, United Kingdom

1948

The Euston Road School and Others, Wakefield Art Gallery, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

1941

Paintings by Members of the Euston Road Group, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom

Appointed visiting teacher at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London, United Kingdom

SELECTED LITERATURE 2016

Anne Goodchild, Alistair Grieve and Elena Crippa (eds)., Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality (London: Lund Humphries, 2016)

2010

Alistair Grieve, Victor Pasmore (London: Tate Publishing, 2010)

1992

Norbert Lynton, Victor Pasmore: Paintings and Graphics 1980-92 (London: Lund Humphries, 1992)

1980

Alan Bowness and Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore with a Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Constructions and Graphics, 1926-1979 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980)

1965

Ronald Alley, Victor Pasmore: Retrospective Exhibition 19251965, Tate Gallery, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 1965)

1945

Clive Bell, Victor Pasmore (London: Penguin Books, 1945)

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ISBN: 978-1-909707-61-0 Cover: Untitled, 1996 Photography: Luke Walker and Mark Dalton Photographs of the Artist: John Pasmore Design: Bright Design London Print: Impress Print Services © 2021 Marlborough

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