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Creative Director MICHAEL LOWELL
Text Contributors
GIULIA PRIVITELLI
ALLAN MULCAHY
Design and Layout
LISA ATTARD
Photography
LISA ATTARD
PETER BARTOLO PARNIS
JOHN PASMORE
VICTOR PASMORE ESTATE
GABRIEL CARUANA FOUNDATION
MARLBOROUGH GRAPHICS
Victor Pasmore Gallery
APS House
275, St Paul Street, Valletta, VLT 1213, Malta
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VICTOR PASMORE GALLERY CATALOGUE
VICTOR PASMORE (1908–1998) AN INTRODUCTION
‘What I have done is not the process of abstraction from nature but a method of constructing from within.’1
Victor Pasmore (1908–1998) has long been considered as a leading protagonist of the twentieth-century modern art movement, whose revolt against the figurative was heralded by Herbert Read as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’ and which, as a result, springboarded his artistic career into an abstract realm branded by a continuous development towards ‘the complete autonomy of painting as an independent object’.2 It is this latter, experimental phase which is represented in the Victor Pasmore Gallery, through works which were mostly produced and left behind in his farmhouse in Gudja, Malta, with others being brought over from Great Britain.3 The works on display essentially trace Pasmore’s move from relief-painting and constructions to painting, while revealing an unbridled fascination with the poetic language of opposites, symbolism and metaphor—all of which are components forming part of an ongoing ‘developing process’ which Pasmore religiously followed until the end.
However, in the true spirit of Pasmore’s intellectual disposition, Pasmore’s conversion to the abstract in 1948 came, surprisingly, at the height of his career.
By that time, he was a predominantly landscape and figurative artist bred in the tradition of the French
Impressionists and post-Impressionist theory, despite never having truly attended art school. Indeed, at the age of fourteen, Pasmore attended Harrow School where he started to foster an interest in painting, and which he sought to develop further at art school. However, this was not to be so as, with the premature death of his father in 1927, Pasmore was left little choice but to work as a clerk with the London County Council. Yet, during the ten mundane years of clerical work which followed, Pasmore’s enthusiasm in art was hardly dampened but, in effect, led him to take up evening classes at the Central School of Art; to be elected as a member of the prestigious London Artists’ Association in 1932; to join the London Group two years later; to become a founding member of the Euston Road School, and secure the liberating patronage of Sir Kenneth Clark in 1938, which gave Pasmore the freedom to focus entirely on his artistic career.
Pasmore’s association with the Euston Road School provided him with an unprecedented opportunity to receive training as a teacher—an experience which was only briefly punctured by the outbreak of war and his short-term imprisonment for deserting the army. True to his pacifist character, Pasmore’s sole predilection was towards artistic development and the nature of the image, which he further claimed to be unshackled by any form of politically motivated content. In any case, his return to Chiswick provided the setting for a series of works which would bring his exploration of
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TOP: Bruno Lorenzelli and Victor Pasmore in Malta, 1973. (Courtesy of John Pasmore)
MIDDLE: Victor Pasmore posing with one of his works outside his house in Gudja, Malta, 1978. (Courtesy of John Pasmore)
BOTTOM: Victor Pasmore at work on his in-situ mural at the Tate, London, 1968. (Courtesy of the Victor Pasmore Estate and Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London)
TOP: Victor Pasmore, Girl with a Hand Mirror, oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8cm, 1938. (Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery, London)
MIDDLE: Victor Pasmore, Children Playing on the Banks of a River, oil on canvas, 58.4 x 79.4cm, signed, 19461947. (Courtesy of John Pasmore)
post-Impressionist techniques and conceptual theories to a close. It was, furthermore, during this period that Pasmore embraced the role of part-time teacher at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts—the beginning of a fruitful academic career that was to culminate in his appointment as visiting lecturer at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and ultimately, as Head of Department of Painting at Durham University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was to develop a radical theoretical approach which ran parallel to his artistic practice.
A few years prior to purchasing a farmhouse in Malta in 1966, Pasmore was selected to represent Great Britain during the Venice Biennale of 1960, which further garnered him an international reputation. It was also during this time that he signed a contract with the Marlborough Gallery and later became a trustee of the Tate Gallery. Reinforced, perhaps, by his involvement in the urban development project of Peterlee New Town,
for which he was later to design the controversial Apollo Pavilion, this phase of Pasmore’s career is characterised by a constructive method whereby works display a logical development of creation which does not depend on abstractions from nature but on a system which operates like nature.4 As the artist himself puts it: ‘The artist makes a concrete object and gives it individuality. He creates a harmony parallel to that of nature and develops it according to a new and original logic’.5
But there soon came a point where these projections could be extended no further, thus revealing the spatial limitations of relief … It became clear that the reality of a work of art cannot be measured by the reality of physical dimension. What matters ultimately is not a physical object as such, but the degree in which its form can stimulate subjective extension. 6
Indeed, symbolism, ambiguity, automatism and spontaneity are among the hallmark qualities of Pasmore’s experimentation in his late artistic practice. In direct relation to his investigation into metaphysical relationships is his fascination with opposing forces and ideas, which are essentially to be found at the basis of human experience as much as they are to be found in the works of the Old Masters:
In really great art opposing forces make up a dialectical harmony which creates a dynamic rather than static beauty. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement , Leonardo’s Last Supper, Giotto’s Betrayal of Judas , Bosch’s Road to Calvary , El Greco’s Resurrection , Gericault’s Slaughter House , and Picasso’s Guernica are a few great examples. 7
Pasmore’s abstraction was, therefore, not a case of isolation from the great traditions of art established throughout history, but a development of them. In line with this, Pasmore’s long-standing appreciation of Turner persisted from the early stages of his artistic career and, tinged with an element of nostalgia, deepened particularly towards the end. This propelled him, in his later years, towards a new-found, unhindered experimentation with colour:
I began as a boy painting under the influence of the French Impressionists and the English painters, Turner and Constable. I was completely fascinated by the late works of Turner which I then saw at the Tate Gallery. For the first time, here were paintings in which you could only really know what they were when you looked at the title underneath.8
Vagueness was, indeed, Turner’s forte as it was similarly for Pasmore.9 The idea of metamorphosis—of development and change—permeates Pasmore’s late works wherein meaning is rarely direct, and where poetic titles are often suggestive and encourage symbolic interpretations. Thus, the image and the text are not born of the same idea but are independently conceived and placed in such a way so that ‘the two form a kind of symbol
or metaphor for each other; in other words, a synthesis’.10 It is, perhaps, Pasmore’s symbolic understanding of the image, combined with the nature of opposites, which also led him to a surprising return to naive figuration, most of which portrays violent scenes of man’s brutality, contrasted with the peace to be found in nature.11
And amid the form, colour, and composition of these independent creations, Pasmore would typically include his initials ‘VP’, ‘because actually that’s the whole content: me. Otherwise, it’s just paint’.12
1 Victor Pasmore, The Artist Speaks, BBC, aired on 15 August 1950.
2 Richard England, Pasmore: Victor, Wendy, John: Graphics, Paintings, Photography, Exhibition catalogue, 9 March – 8 April 2001 (Valletta: St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, 2001), 3.
3 Theresa Vella, ‘Victor Pasmore in Malta’, Treasures of Malta, Vol. 22 No. 1 (Christmas 2015).
4 Pasmore comments on the value of his experience in Malta with regards to the conception of the Apollo Pavilion: ‘The great architectural sculpture, which I designed for Peterlee New Town, was a definite outcome of my experience in modifying and enlarging my Maltese house. Its great thick stone walls, heavy cubic forms and sculptural quality have been re-enacted and transformed into a tensile cantilevered structure in reinforced concrete’. Jasia Reichardt, ‘“Pasmore in Malta”: Some Questions Posed by Jasia Reichardt’, Art International (20 March 1972), 52; cited in Alastair Grieve, ed., Victor Pasmore: Writings and Interviews (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 100.
5 Victor Pasmore, Sunday Times (U.K., 5 February 1961), 21.
7 Letter from Pasmore to Leif Sjöberg, 30 March 1986, cited in Grieve (2010), 136. Pasmore was the curator of the tenth edition of The Artist’s Eye exhibition held at the National Gallery in 1990. This focused on a selection of works produced by Old Masters from the collection of the National Gallery. A catalogue, compiled by Pasmore, was published on the event of this exhibition: The Artist’s Eye, The National Gallery London, 4 July – 7 October 1990.
8 Nicholas Watkins, ‘An interview with Victor Pasmore’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 143 No. 1178 (May 2001), 284.
9 ‘Vagueness is my forte.’ Victor Pasmore, ‘Turner’s Influence on Me’, Turner Society News, No. 11 (October 1978), 6.
10 Letter from Pasmore to Roy Fuller, dated 4 January 1985; cited in Grieve (2010), 140.
11 Grieve (2010), 141.
12 Richard Waite, ‘Taking Stock: Victor Pasmore in Discussion with Andrew Lambirth’, RA, No. 41 (Winter 1993), 51; cited in Grieve (2010), 143.
GREEN AND INDIGO
oil paint and tape on curved plywood, 122 x 51 x 13cm, unsigned, undated (1969)
‘Abstract work will be unable to find its most powerful form in the surface-bound medium of painting alone. Because of its inherent nature, abstract painting cannot revert to conceptual illusionism. Consequently, it is confined to a two-dimensional format. The abstract painter, therefore, inevitably finds his path of development blocked. But the cause of this blockage is not the idea of abstraction itself, but the physical limitation of pictorial material.’
VICTOR PASMORE, ‘WHAT IS ABSTRACT ART?’, THE SUNDAY TIMES (5 FEBRUARY 1961).
PROJECTIVE IMAGE IN WHITE, BLACK AND UMBER
projective painting, oil paint on plywood, 82 x 82cm (with frame), 40.5 x 40.5 x 13cm (without frame), unsigned, undated (1970)
‘Did not the naturalist tradition use perspective in order to produce an illusion of space and solidity? This suggested that the surface format of painting could not provide the conditions necessary for complete independence unless combined with sculpture or architecture. In response to this, therefore, I continued with development or relief projection.’
VICTOR
PASMORE, ‘THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURALIST ART AND THE INDEPENDENCE OF PAINTING’, CONSTRUCTIONS AND GRAPHICS: 1926–1979 (1980).
ABSTRACT IN WHITE, BLACK AND UMBER
projective painting, oil paint on plywood, 91 x 91 x 11.5cm (without board), 109.5 x 109.5cm (with board), unsigned, undated (c.1971)
‘... pure form refers to no other object. It is a reality, logical and sufficient in itself—a function of the intellect rather than a description of it: as such, its relations with space are real and organic … Nevertheless, the idea of pure painting involves certain limitations which prevent it from attaining this relationship in full; it is two-dimensional … In terms of pure form, therefore, painting falls short of the means of attaining full realisation. If the artist wishes to seek development, he must do so in actual dimensions. In pure form, it is sculpture which really becomes supreme.’
VICTOR PASMORE, NINE ABSTRACT ARTISTS: THEIR WORK AND THEORY (1954).
PROJECTIVE PAINTING IN WHITE, BLACK, GREEN AND VIOLET
projective painting, oil paint on plywood, 42 x 42 x 16.5cm (without board), 96 x 96cm (with board), unsigned, undated (c.1974)
‘I am still very much confined to experiments and, at present, working on painted reliefs, which amount to an extension of paper pictures, the loss of material “reality” involved in the reflection of visual imitation is a serious obstacle in the [execution?] of a purely subjective painting.’
VICTOR
PASMORE IN A LETTER TO KENNETH CLARK (1952).
REFLECTIONS ON ABSTRACTION
Linear Symphony No. 3 (1972–1978) / The Eye and the Symbol (1990)
In 2017, on the occasion of Malta’s Presidency of the European Union, two works from the Victor Pasmore collection, Linear Symphony No. 3 (1972–1978) and The Eye and the Symbol (1990), were chosen to be displayed at the Malta. Land of Sea exhibition at BOZAR (17 February – 18 May 2017), Brussels, in a room set side-byside to prehistoric figurines unearthed from sites around the Maltese Islands.
At first glance, it may come across as a rather ill-fated choice to include two abstract works by the British artist in an exhibition that explores Maltese identity with the over-arching theme of ‘Land and Sea’, and not least since Pasmore had tirelessly sought to present his abstractions as ‘independent pictures’, as images which are not tied down by a sense of place and time. Yet, although references to the surrounding environment may have been lifted, these abstract works, both produced independently of each other, nonetheless, find their expression in a new, logical reality, whose relationship with the space they inhabit is not only ‘real and organic’ but primordial and necessary for their perception and, ultimately, conception in the mind of the viewer.1
The placement of these modern, abstract works beside prehistoric artefacts produced over 5000 years ago, thus, confers on them a material and symbolic quality which is at once more compelling and palpable. In both these two artworks, it is the pre-eminence of the incised line—
at times crude and spontaneous, at times controlled— which guides the objective construction of the work and denotes its entire content.
Pasmore’s epiphany of the line may be traced to his meeting with Joan Miró (1893–1983) prior to the Second World War, when he rediscovered line ‘not as a delicate sort of thing, but as something with an emotional reality about it’.2 Pasmore’s obsession with formal elements persisted throughout his last thirty years living and working on the island, where untapped aspects of the line and other forms might have possibly awoken due to the close proximity to the primitive and ancient past. Incidentally, the subconscious mind inherently participates in this ‘emotional reality’, which is further intimately connected to memory. Indeed, as Pasmore himself puts it:
... as the line develops organically, in accordance with the process of scribbling, we find ourselves directing its course towards a particular but unknown end; until finally an image appears which surprises us by its familiarity and touches us as if awakening forgotten memories buried long ago.3
There is, in fact, a mysteriously uncanny alliance between the subconscious and the patterns found in nature, regardless to time and place.4 With this in mind, it may therefore, be only too natural to view Linear Symphony No. 3 in light of Pasmore’s earlier fibrous and
impressionistic images of the Hammersmith Garden series, or the ocular forms of The Eye and the Symbol as merely representational and figurative.
This ‘emotional reality’, however, is only rendered visible insofar as line goes, and thus, remains largely a matter of symbolic language. In essence, the natural forms or anthropomorphic representations of the prehistoric artefacts aim towards a similar transcendental, intangible ‘reality’. Having said this, however, Pasmore’s abstractions as are those of his contemporaries, are also temporarily removed from the abstract trend which emerged in the Neolithic or Bronze Age era, though possessing the same ‘symbol-carving quality of primitive mentality which was dictated by inner necessity’.5
Yet, in his statements about his late works, Pasmore often emphasises the idea that his abstractions are ‘constructed from within’ and move outwards, obtaining a concrete form, and thus, reveal an inner, psychological world. It is essentially a worldview which falls back on Paul Klee’s infamous statement that ‘art does not render the visible but renders visible’. Pasmore’s later painting, The Eye and the Symbol, perhaps, more acutely encapsulates this visual reality. Here, the ‘Eye’ and the ‘Symbol’—what is seen and what is potential—meet in the same stream of consciousness and interact in an ambiguous and, at best, suggestive manner.6
The proximity between reality and possibility is the ground on which Pasmore furthered his experimentation with abstract images. Certainly, his move to the remote village of Gudja, in 1966, provided him with the insularity necessary to both rediscover physical, sensory realities such as light and colour, as well as to develop new forms of a symbolic nature. The possibilities were, in this regard, infinite, and moreover aligned with his belief that ‘the only future of abstract painting is through symbolism, of sorts’.7 Thus, the need to transcend reality was not merely weathered down to a complete rejection of its visual and tangible forms, or of how they come to be, but rather, provoked a rebellion against the finality of the meaning and experience of these forms. The Eye and the Symbol, as with other similar works of the period, thus, attempts to purify the faculty of seeing and challenges
the viewer with the subjective task of meaning-making so that one may ‘start with “what the painting is” and finish at something else—a symbol of “what it is not”, a thing of the spirit’.8
This duality of experience is, in effect, paralleled in the forms Pasmore uses to construct his work. In both Linear Symphony No. 3 and The Eye and the Symbol, rational and geometrically calculated lines are contrasted with curved and spontaneously incised lines—compositional elements which, to a certain extent, mirror what Pasmore describes as ‘the objective form of the work, on the one hand, and the subjective image on the other’.9 Coincidentally, this dialogue between rational and irrationality, the harmony between extremes and opposites animates the conversations Pasmore often had with his fellow peers and students.10 In concrete form, thus, the rational organisation of aesthetic forms allows for a subjective response, paradoxically, in much the same way that order and structure elicited ‘the extreme irrationality in the paintings of Picasso, Miró or Pollock, for instance’, which Pasmore goes on to describe as ‘the voice of individuality shouting to be heard above the noise of man’s modern rational invention, machine-power’.11
Indeed, technology had always had an important say since the very beginning of aesthetic development. In the twentieth century, however, centuries of artistic expression were eclipsed by an unprecedented mechanised age in which human activity came to be inherently dependent upon the machine. Whereas the threatening face of technology was met with considerably diverse rebellious trends of expression, other artists, such as Pasmore, chose to embrace the new surge of possibilities modern technology brought with it, including its mass-produced materials and techniques. ‘The solution’, postulates Pasmore, ‘does not lie in working against technical advances … but in directing them towards constructive ends. Only when the artist, as well as the industrialist, has conquered the machine, can the machine age be considered civilised … Modern machinery is only a new tool; it is up to the artist to use it’.12
In addition, this was also, an age which saw two wars leaving an indelible mark on humanity, as a period
‘I
consciously avoid being influenced by visual, optical scenery now—however much I think it beautiful (and I do). I’m not interested in “abstract” pictures of clouds, say, of the sea. Not one iota. I’m interested in producing a completely independent picture, which can suggest a symbol for abstract ideas.’
VICTOR PASMORE IN LIZ JOBEY, ‘THE MAN WHO TOOK ART BACK TO BASICS’, THE SUNDAY TIMES (FEBRUARY 1985).
riddled with chaos and the need for structure and order. As a conscientious objector to conscription in the war, Pasmore might have just as likely viewed the perfection of structured, logical compositions as the foundation for the future of painting and artistic stability. It is with this mind-set, perhaps, that one may come to view the clash between the irrational and the arbitrary, and the rational, logical, and repetitive motifs of Pasmore work, especially as exemplified in Linear Symphony No. 3
This work in particular brings yet another key reference point into play, which is not solely restricted to its title: music. Albeit not exclusively, much of the terminology Pasmore uses to entitle his work is, in fact, ‘borrowed’ or shared with that pertaining to music. Indeed, one finds Symphonies, Harmonies, Movements and Compositions among his more fluid abstractions of the 1970s, some of which also form part of the collection displayed here at the Victor Pasmore Gallery. However, apart from the shared nomenclature, Pasmore often admitted to having ‘tried to compose as music is composed, with formal elements, which in themselves have no descriptive qualities at all’.13 The idea that music, as the quintessential abstract art form, had survived the ages through its own inherent system of construction, must have surely appealed to the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Klee, and Piet Mondrian, and with them, Pasmore too.14
Coupled with the introduction of new media and technological advances, painting need not merely be approached from an aesthetic outlook, but also from a spatial and emotive one. Recalling the ‘emotive reality’ of the line, Pasmore explains:
I began to slash across the face of my geometric constructions powerful, spontaneous lines. This introduction of a conscious irrational process into a rationalised construction in order to create an optical effect was the beginning of my renewed interest in painting.15
Just as Paul Bernhard arguably claims that ‘all music is made with machines, the throat alone is organic’,16 the linear motifs used to construct Linear Symphony No. 3 and The Eye and the Symbol may, likewise, be viewed
as the organic tools which Victor Pasmore implements to wrest the supremacy of the machine and permit the ‘subjective extension of the painting.’
1 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Art News and Review, Vol. 3 No. 2 (24 February 1951), 3.
2 Peter Fuller, ‘Victor Pasmore: The Case for Modern Art’, Modern Painters, Vol. 1 No. 4 (Winter 1988 – 1989), 22-31: 26.
3 Victor Pasmore,The Space Within: New Paintings, exhibition catalogue (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1969).
4 Brian Dennis, ‘Metamorphosis in Modern Culture: The Parallel Evolution of Music and Painting in the Twentieth Century,’ Tempo, No. 78 (Autumn 1966), 12-21: 20.
5 J. P. Houdin, ‘The Timeless and the Timebound in Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16 No. 4 (June 1958), 497-502: 499.
6 Giulia Privitelli, ‘The Cover’, Treasures of Malta, Vol. 22 No. 3 (Summer 2016), 81.
7 Fuller (1988), 31.
8 Letter from Pasmore to Leif Sjöberg, 30 March 1986, cited in Alastair Grieve, Victor Pasmore: Writings and Interviews (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 136.
9 Jasia Reichardt, ‘“Pasmore in Malta”: Some Questions Posed by Jasia Reichardt’, Art International, Vol. 16 (1972), 50-53; also cited in Grieve (2010), 108.
10 Richard England, ‘Victor Pasmore (1908–1998). Personal Reflections’, Treasures of Malta, Vol. 22 No. 3 (Summer 2016), 20-23: 21.
11 Grieve (2010), 135.
12 Grieve (2010), 65.
13 Pasmore (1951), 3.
14 Dennis (1966), 15.
15 Reichardt (1972), 53.
16 Paul Bernhard, ‘Mechanik und Organik’, Der Auftakt, Vol. 10 No. 11 (1930), 238240: 239.
LINEAR SYMPHONY NO. 3
oil paint, charcoal, graphite on chipboard and plywood, 122 x 122, signed, undated (1972–1978)
‘If we take a sheet of paper and scribble on it vigorously we become involved in the process of bringing into being something concrete and visible which was not there before … What mattered initially was not what our scribble would represent, but what it might become.’
VICTOR PASMORE, THE SPACE WITHIN (1969).
THE EYE AND THE SYMBOL
oil paint, charcoal, graphite on chipboard, 81.5 x 81.5cm (without board), 123.5 x 123.5cm (with board), signed, 1990
‘Once independent, a painting becomes the sole visual object so that its content becomes totally immanent in its form and image, a condition which renders its meaning essentially potential. Emerging in anonymity, therefore, the new painting can become a sign or symbol of infinite extension, directly finding its place in the eye and mind of the spectator.’
VICTOR PASMORE, IMAGES OF COLOUR (1983).
Victor Pasmore at work in a restaurant on London’s South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain, 6 January 1951. Originally published in Picture Post, No. 5178. (Courtesy of the Hultan Archive / Photo: Charles Hewitt)
REFLECTIONS ON COMPOSITION
In ‘The Artist Speaks’, Victor Pasmore sets out his mission statement: ‘I have tried to compose as music is composed, with formal elements which, in themselves, have no descriptive qualities at all’.1 He then elaborates further:
Having lost their particular identity these elements are no longer abstractions in the same sense as the drawing of a human head, an animal or a tree. As these elements combine with each other on the canvas, so are the emotions and ideas evoked—the act of drawing a spiral in a variety of ways will evoke emotions similar to those associated with the spiral movements of nature.2
Pasmore traced these human gestures and movements in the act of creation to something primordial, to something that is precisely founded in nature: ‘Art imitates nature in the manner of her operation’, Pasmore affirms. ‘… painting, like music, is not an imitation of nature … like nature, painting is solid and made up of parts; the same eye that looks at it, looks at nature’.3 To put it differently: the same ear that listens to music, listens to the sounds of nature. Painting and music share a common subjective standpoint, that is, the artist and the composer—and by extension, the viewer and the listener—and their relation to the ‘objective’ product of nature that can be seen, touched, or heard. Pasmore’s view of the role of the abstract artist might help to elucidate this point further. That is, the aim is ‘to build from a simple but objective centre’ (and therefore to
operate like nature) until a ‘subjective circumference’ is found—the touch of the artist or composer and the reception of the viewer or listener.4
In the shared dynamic operating within abstract art and music, there is yet another common factor: chaos. Chaos and irrationality are a fundamental ingredient to creation. Importantly, during the late 1970s—a decade throughout which Pasmore’s ‘musical’ works resonate most loudly—the seemingly chaotic behaviour of familiar daily happenings and objects starts to gain more attention among the intellectual community, and, effectively, becomes a foothold on which new scientific theories are based. ‘With the visual and objective world rendered ambiguous by modern scientific ideas like relativity, four dimensions’, explains Pasmore, ‘its representation in painting also became ambiguous; a condition which led to increasing subjective and irrational freedom’.5
With this reasoning, the more ‘abstract’ a painting becomes, or rather, the more ‘unconditional’, the greater freedom it allows and requests from the eyes and mind of the viewer. Freed even from the artist, the work thus becomes more open to possibilities of meaning and feeling. It is the effect of what Pasmore describes as a painting ‘emerging in anonymity … where the new painting can become a sign or symbol of infinite extension, directly finding its place in the eye and mind of the spectator’.6
Pasmore’s view of abstract art—like music in fact that cannot be particularly defined, or like a composition that
does not generate one set feeling or one set memory— is one that does not seek to tell the viewer anything specific; this that would be a kind of imposition, a kind of constraint. Rather, in a way, abstract art, in this view, humbles itself to the point of mattering less than what the viewer finally perceives and makes of that symbol; it is free of the artist who made it and of the surface that carries it: ‘what mattered initially’, tells us Pasmore, ‘was not what our scribble would represent, but what it might become’.7
In the same way that chaos and order or irrationality, spontaneity and control would seem to be opposites to each other, this may also be found in the musical compositions of Mro Charles Camilleri, a Maltese pioneer of modern musical compositions, and a peer to Pasmore during his stay on the island in the latter half of the twentieth century. As Mro John Galea noted, in a talk given at the former Victor Pasmore Gallery, located then at the Annexe of the Central Bank of Malta, Valletta: ‘in the music of Charles Camilleri, chaotic dynamics led to the discovery of a disorderly behaviour inherent in simple systems that acted as creative processes.’
This almost runs directly parallel to the simple forms and shapes, spaces, dots, lines, and planes that we find in Pasmore’s ‘compositions’. Camilleri’s work was known to Pasmore. In fact, we find in the artists’ private possession, for example, the musical score of Bach’s Prelude with notes by Charles Camilleri musing on the cosmic and spontaneous qualities of composed and improvised music, echoing perhaps the belief that ‘in our time, we are becoming more aware of the difference between one-dimensional space of “reversible time” (repetition) and the infinitely dimensional space of “chaos” (improvisation)’.8
This conscious repetition of forms and subconscious spontaneity are in a constant play in Pasmore’s creations. Indeed, the majority of the works he produced in Malta can be seen and discussed with this relation in mind—the almost mechanic repetition, precision, and surprising spontaneity and randomness. These are the same forces that are at play in the works we find on display at the gallery.
With works such as A Harmony of Opposing Forces, Linear Symphony in Four Movements No.1, or Linear Symphony No. 3, or even Linear Symmetery in Five Movements, the titles themselves hint at this intimate link between abstract painting and music: the canvas and the score; the formal elements like notes on a page, and their transformation into emotion and memory once received by the eye and ear of the beholder. Perhaps this is what Camilleri meant by the ‘power of sound’,9 or silent sound, in the case of Pasmore’s paintings. Perhaps this is, indeed, the ‘most abstract’ reality that Pasmore aspired to absorb into his two-dimensional works.
1 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Art News and Review, Vol. 3 No. 2 (24 February 1951), 3.
2 Ibid.
3 Pasmore (1951), 3.
4 Victor Pasmore , ‘What is Abstract Art’, Sunday Times (1961), 3.
5 Victor Pasmore, Victor Pasmore: New Work, exhibition catalogue (London: Marlborough Fine Arts, 1995).
6 Victor Pasmore, in Victor Pasmore. Images of Colour. 1980–1983, exhibition catalogue (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1983).
7 Victor Pasmore, in The Space Within (1969).
8 Victor Pasmore Gallery archives, Charles Camilleri, ‘Morphogenesis’, a note written by Camilleri to Bach’s Prelude I.
9 ‘Someday we shall discover the power of sound! It would be the most abstract and spiritual of all time.’
A HARMONY OF OPPOSING FORCES
projective painting, oil paint on chipboard and plywood, 151.5 x 151.5 x 21cm (without frame), 155 x 155 x 27cm (with frame) signed, 1962
‘The artist makes a concrete object and gives it individuality. He creates a harmony parallel to that of nature and develops it according to a new and original logic.’
VICTOR PASMORE, ‘WHAT IS ABSTRACT ART?’, THE SUNDAY TIMES (5 FEBRUARY 1961).
LINEAR SYMPHONY IN FOUR MOVEMENTS NO. 1
oil paint and charcoal on chipboard, 51 x 140.5cm, signed, undated (1963–1973)
LINEAR SYMMETRY IN FIVE MOVEMENTS
oil paint and tape on plywood, 152.5 x 152.5cm, unsigned, undated (1969–1977)
‘I have tried to compose as music is composed, with formal elements which, in themselves, have no descriptive qualities at all.’
VICTOR PASMORE, ‘THE ARTIST SPEAKS’, ART NEWS AND REVIEW, VOL. 3 NO. 2 (24 FEBRUARY 1951).
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
oil paint and spray paint on chipboard and hardboard, 41 x 243.5 x 6cm, signed, undated (1974–1975)
‘Fragmentation enabled the painter to symbolise the relativity of perception as well as the new multi-dimensional concept of space, but it did so at the expense of the objects represented … abstract art demanded the complete autonomy of painting as an independent object analogous to music.’
VICTOR PASMORE, THE ARTIST’S EYE
(1990).
UNTITLED [I]
(possibly from the Black Development or Black Rhythm series, c.1970s) projective relief, oil paint on plywood, 82 x 40.5 x 12cm (without frame), 109 x 67 x 10cm (with frame), unsigned, undated
‘One has to find a new objectivity— both in form and in ideas. It is simpler with music, because musical sounds are themselves three-dimensional like [nature?].
VICTOR PASMORE IN A LETTER TO KENNETH CLARK (1952).
REFLECTIONS ON VISUAL POETRY
‘It has been said by the ancients that poetry is a picture without form, and painting is a poem with form’.1
In several of his poetic writings (or ramblings) Pasmore questions the self, the identity of things—‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are you?’, ‘What is the image over there?’, ‘By what means can we know?’. It is a parallel, an extension maybe, of the same way that he seems to question his own artistic process: a lengthy investigation into the validity of his work, of his technique and the creative act as they are continuously modified over time, while being subjected, at every turn, to the forces of improvisation, spontaneity and chance, and to the limits of the medium itself, in this case, the word and image.
The exploration of interlocking and globular shapes, of precisely defined forms, irrational scribbles and the fixed pathways of freely moving ink, and the resulting image that forms when these elements are brought into ‘contact’ with one another, is one that continuously preoccupied Pasmore. He would often spend long spans of time completing an artwork, experimenting with it, abandoning it and returning to it, transforming it and connecting it to other works. We see this play in how text and image are brought together to form one work, and how one image is swapped for another to create a new relationship and possibility for new meaning between the text and image, even with the slightest alteration of the image or of the verse. Similarly, stanzas or verses from complete poems are extracted or
abstracted, rather, and connected to one image or another. We find the same lines of words applied to different images, to compose a new work, and vice versa. The possibilities for new meaning, even though there is repetition (in form and word), in this way are quite literally endless.
And all this experimentation, playfulness, and interest in essentially ancient preoccupations with the self and place in this world, was injected with a new sense of mystery precisely at the time Pasmore had moved to Malta. By his own admission: ‘What, perhaps, is relevant to my new painting in Malta is that the close and constant proximity of the ancient, mythological and Neolithic past has reinforced my orientation from the physics of art to its biological and psychological content’.2
This idea gives context to the several mythological references we find in his writings, and even in the choice of titles he gives to his painted and printed works:
Look into the pool Narcissus found; See symmetry reflected there.
Or:
Will you cast your seed among the stars, Or will you fall, Like Icarus, To the ground from which you sprung?
Even in his own handwritten notes, he describes Malta with its views of the sea as seen from the cliffs as if it were itself a setting extracted from Homer’s Odyssey; a poetic lure trickled out of the island, connecting it to a mysterious and remote past. And you could almost imagine Pasmore walking along that cliff’s edge and wondering, in the same way he would wonder at the edge of a canvas or new sheet of paper, asking questions on consciousness, on man’s relation to the world, looking across the sea to the horizon with hardly a soul in sight and wondering what it means to be alone.
Search the shores of an ancient land, under the stars along the sand; between the pines and cactus tree see the stone where the lizard sleeps. What is the object over there?
Who is the man by the orange tree?
The voices calling In the square?
The light flickers out at sea?3
These are questions which in themselves are related to myths and archetypes, questions that are written
all over his poetry and his visual images, examples of which were even printed as limited-edition books—as collections of visual poems—such as The Dance of Man in Modern Times (1972), Images of the World (1975), Burning Waters (1995) and The Man Within (1997). But they are ultimately, also questions posed to us, now both as reader and a viewer: to consider our place in the world and the role of art to assist us in figuring this out.
1 Kuo Jo-Hsi, ‘The Meaning of Painting’ (1935).
2 Reihardt (1972), 50-53.
3 Victor Pasmore, What is the Object Over There. Points of Contact No. 17, 1974.
TWO LINES FROM A BALLAD OF KIPLING
oil paint, spray paint, charcoal and graphite on plywood inscribed in ink, 84 x 210.5cm (without board), 87 x 213.5cm (with board), signed, undated (c.1992), inscribed with verses from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Screw-guns: ‘Smokin’ my pipe on the mounting, sniffin’ the morning cool, / I walks in my old Brown gaiters along o’ my old brown mule. / R K.’
‘For me, Malta still belongs to mythology and imagination. Sitting sometimes on the cliffs overlooking the Blue Grotto not far from my house I feel that I can see Homer and his Ulysses down below in the bay coming in from the east to anchor their boat at the entrance to the cave. For me, therefore, Malta is a poet’s island and I hope it will stay that way.’
IN AN UNTITLED NOTE BY VICTOR PASMORE (1989), FROM THE FORMER PASMORE ESTATE AT BLACKHEATH, UK.
THE MORNING STAR. THE BIRTH OF PSYCHE: BLUE SYMPHONY
oil paint, spray paint and graphite on canvas, 124 x 236cm (with frame), 103 x 206cm (without frame), signed, undated (1982)
‘In
contrast to the measurable world of the Renaissance and classical science, the modern world presents a process of opposing forces, evolutionary developments and ambiguous relationships. Attempts to rationalise this in philosophy have been echoes in the abstract, conceptual and ambiguous imagery of modern art’.
VICTOR PASMORE, THE ARTIST’S EYE (1990).
UNTITLED [II]
(from the Blue Symphony series) oil paint and spray paint on plywood, 122 x 183cm, unsigned, undated (1982–1986)
‘Only during the process of painting and representing objects of the visual world has the pictorial image become something else; that is to say, “what it actually is”, an independent thing with its own image. But now, in our century, the reverse condition has evolved by which we can start with “what the painting is” and finish with something else—a symbol of “what it is not”, a
thing of the spirit.’
VICTOR
PASMORE, ‘THE AMBIGUOUS ART’ (1986).
16 April 1962.
OVERLEAF
Victor Pasmore in front of his Fall of Icarus (1995). Published in The Sunday Review, 8 October 1995. (Photo: Madeleine Waller)
LEFT: Victor Pasmore photgraphed in his London Studio by Lord Snowdon, bromide print,
RIGHT: Photograph of Victor Pasmore’s studio at Dar Ġamri, in Gudja, Malta.
‘NATURE IS AN INTERACTION OF OPPOSITES, AND ART IS A SYMBOL OF LIFE, IN BOTH ITS ASPECTS, TRAGIC AND JOYFUL.’
THE FALL OF ICARUS
oil paint, spray paint, graphite and charcoal on plywood, 240 x 110cm (without frame), 305 x 137cm (with frame), signed, undated (1992–1995)
‘I just had a plywood board. I had it in the Academy this year … The Bird, the harmony of opposites. Something that will kill the bird. It’s a threat. The bird will never escape.’
CATHY COURTNEY, ‘ARTISTS’ BOOKS: VICTOR PASMORE TALKS’, ART MONTHLY, NO. 191 (NOVEMBER 1995).
UNTITLED [III]
oil paint, spray paint, graphite and charcoal on plywood, 84 x 204cm, signed, 1995
‘I am now very impressed by the Surrealists but I never was before. I was always antagonistic to them. I think the surrealist movement was of tremendous importance. A sort of synthesis of Surrealism and rationalism is what interests me now and what I’m trying to do in my painting.’
VICTOR PASMORE IN AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS WATKINS (14 SEPTEMBER
1995).
A DEEPER LOOK by Allan Mulcahy
REFLECTIONS ON PLACE PASMORE’S HOUSE IN MALTA
During a visit to Malta in 1966, artists Victor Pasmore and his wife Wendy (1915–2015) acquired an old farmhouse called Dar Ġamri, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. Having encountered language problems during their visits to Ibiza and Mallorca in the early 1960s while looking for a holiday home, the Pasmores decided to try English-speaking Malta, following advice received during their attendance at the 1965 Venice Biennale.
Attracted by the honey-coloured traditional stone buildings, the abundance of hardware shops useful for sourcing materials to construct abstract reliefs, as well as Wendy’s developing interest in providing a home for numerous stray animals, resulted in Dar Ġamri becoming their permanent home.
Dar Ġamri (in English: The house of John-Mary), stands adjacent to a narrow winding country lane just over a kilometre and a half from the small village of Gudja. The lane, formerly known as St George Street, but recently named after Victor Pasmore, is edged by rubble stone field walls, small cube-shaped limestone farm buildings and clumps of trees and plants including carob, fig, and prickly pear.
Shortly after their arrival on the island, the Pasmores showed an interest in the work of Maltese architect Richard England, and it was with his help that Dar Ġamri was found and preliminary ideas developed. At that time, Dar Ġamri was an unused two-storey farmhouse, altered and extended over three hundred years or so, with
attached single-storey livestock and storage outbuildings forming a courtyard group.
The farmhouse, or razzett as it is locally known, is a particularly important example of Maltese vernacular architecture. Characteristically plain and compact, the cubic form was probably developed from simple singlestorey dry-stone field rooms used for storing crops and tools and providing temporary shelter. Combining animal and storage facilities in single rooms grouped around a central yard then became usual practice. Although this arrangement may never initially have been intended for human habitation, two-storey farmhouses were subsequently built, as at Dar Ġamri, to provide in situ family accommodation at first-floor level, accessed by an open external staircase.
In contrast to the plain and austere exteriors of ‘older’ farmhouses, the ashlar façades and simple ornamental stone detailing on the farmhouse at Dar Ġamri suggests significant building work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These details include a string course and ball finials at roof level and, additionally, a shaped cornice around the main entrance doorway, terminating above in a religious niche which is inset into the façade and devoted to the Virgin Mary. An inscribed marble tablet dates the niche to 1871.
Apart from retaining and adapting the old farmhouse and adjoining outbuildings as their main living areas, the Pasmores also built, paved, and planted courtyards
enclosed within high stone walls, various outbuildings for family and guest accommodation, external studios and workshops, as well as landscaped open garden areas.
Covering a total area of about three quarters of an acre, the plot remains surrounded by small fields enclosed by rubble stone walls and other farm buildings, some of which have also been converted for non-agricultural use. Dar Ġamri was built using honey-coloured Globigerina limestone, which is soft and easily worked, but hardens slightly on exposure and weathers to form a protective crust. This is the material most typically associated with traditional building construction. In Dar Ġamri, this type of stone was used for the thick external cavity walls which were built with large blocks and infilled with soil and stone chippings, for the internal partition walls, rib arches, corbel support for the stone slabs at the upperfloor and roof levels, and as flagstone paving throughout. Timber beams were also used in wider rooms, offering additional support for upper-stone floors and roof slabs.
Horizontal glazed apertures, cast in concrete, characterise the façade of the small single-storey entrance lobby. This was added by the Pasmores adjacent to the old farmhouse, and probably designed to create contrast with the weathered stone façade of the relatively windowless old building. The character of the original plain façade of the house facing the lane has been affected, to some extent, by the alterations undertaken by the Pasmores, including the partial infilling of the main and cart entrance doorways, the introduction of small windows, and the additions of a low-level stone string course and a balconette with wrought iron railings at the first-floor level.
Adjacent to the entrance lobby were the kitchen and dining areas, divided by an unpainted stone partition in which a large arched opening visually linked the two spaces. Other stone walls and ceilings in the areas, supported by timber beams painted in blue, were either limewashed or left unpainted and the original flagstones were either replaced or covered over by ceramic floor tiles. For privacy, a split bamboo canopy was suspended horizontally just below the ceiling soffit in the dining area. A concrete bench cast in situ provided seating—a method also used elsewhere in the house to create ‘fixed furniture.’
A glazed door linked the dining area to a room used, at a later stage, by Wendy as a bedsitting room. This room, originally the cart storage area, together with a small adjoining room, initially served as a studio. In this area, as elsewhere, a stone transverse rib arch provided additional support with timber beams for the stone slab ceiling. Artworks by Victor, Wendy, and John Pasmore covered the walls in these areas.
Another door from the dining area opened into a room known as the ‘yellow tile room’. Located in part of the original yard area and built from lightweight construction material, this area, which had large aluminium framed windows and a corrugated plastic roof, was planned by Wendy as an outdoor space during inclement weather. Ceramic tiles replaced the original flagstone paving in the yard because some areas were in a poor condition or slippery. Like sentinels, two-metre-high freestanding stone sculptures, painted and unpainted, guarded the area. Furthermore, tiled plinths and platforms for seating and other possible uses abutted stone well heads along the two sides of the yard.
Comfort and accessibility were also factors contributing to the decision to enclose the previously uncovered external stone steps leading to the first floor of the main building. A circular stone lobby was built at the bottom of the steps adjacent to the kitchen, and a timber-framed canopy was added to cover the steps. Although sensible practical considerations were behind the later decision to enclose the steps, this had some impact on the character and appearance of the plain and simple original building.
The large main bedroom took up most of the upper floor. This had white painted walls and ceiling and blue painted wooden beams. Small window openings were curtained, floor tiles replaced the original flagstones, and artworks lined the walls. Suspended over the bed was a testerlike, stained timber-framed and plywood canopy. A low partition separated the bathroom from the bedroom at one end and a curtained opening led to a dressing room at the other end. A stone balconette with a wrought-iron railing was added to an enlarged original window opening in the dressing room wall facing the lane, allowing views out over the countryside. A glazed observation lobby was
built enabling access from the dressing room onto the flat roofs of the adjoining single-storey courtyard buildings.
A range of single-storey buildings, formerly used for livestock and farm storage, abut the main two-storey farmhouse, forming a courtyard. Traditionally, cows, sheep, and goats were stall-fed and spent most of their time confined, although occasionally, in fine weather, goats and sheep were taken out to graze over unused rocky land and roadside verges. As well as providing housing for animals and storage for fodder, tools, and equipment, the courtyard plan helped with animal husbandry and some security and shelter from the elements, particularly wind.
A feature which caught Pasmore’s eye was the abstract pattern created by small square and circular shaped apertures, forming access to rows of pigeon roosts hollowed out within the top two courses of the stone walls inside the courtyard (barumbara). Below the roost, a projecting stone shelf enabled the birds to perch.
The so-called living room, although it was rarely used for this purpose, was the largest room within the courtyard buildings group, measuring approximately ten metres by four metres, probably a former animal room. With mainly white painted walls and ceiling and blue painted timber beams, the space was dominated by the display of artworks including paintings, constructions, maquettes, and other sculptural items—even a mobile piece suspended from the ceiling. Prominently positioned towards the centre of the room was a low-level ‘sculptural’ concrete display table with an upturned end. Adjacent to this was a wall-mounted display unit, all painted white. A low-level display plinth ran along one side of the room forming the base of the wall designed as a sculptural relief. At one end of the room, a partition created a small sitting area with fixed furniture and bookshelves, while at the oppose end, a glazed door led to a small room with a desk and fitted bookshelves used by Victor Pasmore as a study.
Other spaces within the converted farm buildings and around the courtyard included a bedroom, toilet, and storeroom. Furthermore, a room was set aside for
preparing food for the numerous dogs and cats that were given a home. An important factor in the decision by the Pasmores to make Dar Ġamri their home was the opportunity of being able to make use of the yard facility as an outdoor room for most of the year. Climate conditions as well as security and privacy hold an important place in this type of courtyard building, being particularly well suited for countries with abundant sunshine, blustery winds, and mild winters. The protection and shelter from winds offered by the yard walls enabled the area to be used reasonably comfortably for most of the year. For this reason, a pre-cast concrete floor unit, adapted for use as a table, and shaded by a split bamboo canopy, became a social hub.
Adjacent to the original group of courtyard buildings, including the farmhouse, storage areas and animal housing, the rest of the site was previously used as a small field enclosed by rubble stone walls. With the assistance of Wistin (Augustine) for labour, a local man from Gudja, two large additional courtyards were set out using roughcut ashlar limestone blocks to form enclosing walls of up to five metres in height.
Numerous trees and shrubs were planted including eucalyptus, oleander, bougainvillaea, hibiscus, plumbago, araucaria, yucca, grapefruit, orange, lemon and pomegranate, many of which filled the courtyard nearest the farmhouse and known as the ‘entrance courtyard’; a peaceful place of colour, shade, and birdsong for much of the year. Mainly paved with limestone flagstones, creating a pattern of pathways, intimate sitting areas and tree and shrub beds, this courtyard also featured carefully positioned freestanding portal-like stone sculptures— more sentinels.
This outer courtyard and garden area could be directly accessed through a buttressed and thick dry-stone wall doorway which opened directly from the public lane adjacent to Dar Ġamri.
Beyond the entrance courtyard and an area reserved for small utility buildings, including a garage and kennels, was the so-called ‘pool courtyard’. Similarly enclosed by high and think dry-stone walls, the area was mainly paved
apart from a group of small fruit trees and plants formally arranged in a wonderful setting of stepped plant beds and stone and timber pergolas around the swimming pool. A large, blue-painted mural extended from within the pool, over the stepped pool edge, painted in white, and up and across the high adjacent courtyard wall. Other structures within the pool courtyard include a simple block building, partially altered with exposed concrete blockwork, used originally by Wendy as a studio and subsequently as family accommodation. Adjacent to this building was an open covered area supported by stone columns and used by Victor as a studio.
Here and there were carefully positioned small freestanding stone sculptures and tables. As in the entrance courtyard, a wide external staircase provided easy access to the flat roofs of adjacent buildings for circulation and views.
Furthest away from the house and beyond the courtyards was the garden area, more open in character, and selectively planted with trees and shrubs. It was subdivided by curved rubble stone walls to create more intimate seating enclosures. Moreover, a number of grapevine pergolas arranged as sculptures with limestone uprights and wooden framework, were carefully located in this area. Climatic conditions dramatically affected the character of these open garden areas in contrasting but equally attractive ways: lush green ground cover in winter, and a baked-earth carpet in the summer months.
A small building designed mostly by Wendy, and known as the ‘baby pavilion’, was put up in 2002 to provide a sheltered view of the garden and also as additional guest accommodation.
they have been degraded over time by unchecked growth and urbanisation. The cultural value of the Maltese rural countryside lies in what led Pasmore to settle in Malta in the first place, in what led him to comment on Maltese buildings as though one were looking at a cubist painting when descending from above.
Peterlee New Town’s importance and recognition as a cultural landscape owes much to Pasmore’s legacy, as well as to his ability to experiment with architectural forms in his farmhouse in Gudja. Were it not for his urban designs for Peterlee Town and especially the sculpturalarchitectural invention of the Apollo Pavilion (1967–1971), which reshaped the face of Peterlee, this urban centre would have been lacking an irreplaceable cultural component. The degradation or loss of landscapes which at some point inspired or contributed to the development of an artistic creation, implies the loss of cultural values which cannot be recreated elsewhere without undermining something of their initial authenticity.
The development of such rural areas, therefore, does not simply have ecological and environmental implications, but artistic and creative ones too. To conserve such areas is also to conserve their spirit—a spirit which led artists such as Pasmore to develop and discover new possibilities of expression and, ultimately, to leave a legacy which, despite its foreign roots, is inevitably fused to the eventual inheritance of future Maltese generations.
The landscape with which Pasmore engaged in the 1960s and throughout the rest of the twentieth century still holds within it potential values for current and future generations to explore—values for which there is no means for us to know the extent of their creative power if we allow them to simply ‘sleep in their tomb’.1
Victor Pasmore’s choice to take up permanent residence in Gudja in 1966, in favour of the cosmopolitan and progressive centre of London, offers Malta’s rural areas a new and somewhat different cultural value. This is not to say that Pasmore’s works enable us to qualify the extent by which the rural surroundings had an impact on his work or artistic method, or to qualify the extent by which
1 From a poem by Victor Pasmore, Burning Waters (Malta: Progress Press, 1988).
LEFT: Victor Pasmore in one of the courtyards at Dar Ġamri, Gudja. Visible in the background, hanging on the wall, is one of the works (Untitled IV) on display at the Victor Pasmore Gallery, Valletta. (Courtesy of the Victor Pasmore Estate / Photo: John Pasmore)
RIGHT: Interior view of the living room / gallery at Dar Ġamri. Visible through the glazed door is Victor Pasmore’s study. (Photo: Allan Mulcahy)
LEFT: Yard and courtyard buildings adjacent to the main farmhouse. A feature which caught Pasmore’s eye was the abstract pattern created by small square and circular shaped apertures, forming access to rows of pigeon roosts hollowed out within the top two courses of the stone walls inside the courtyard (barumbara). Below the roost, a projecting stone shelf enabled the birds to perch. A free-standing sentinel, designed by Victor Pasmore is also pictured here. (Photo: Allan Mulcahy)
RIGHT: Pool courtyard with abstract patterns painted by Victor Pasmore all around the courtyard and within the pool. (Photo: Allan Mulcahy)
Victor and Wendy Pasmore with guests at the table in the farmhouse yard at Dar Ġamri, Gudja. Visible in the background is one of the works (Untitled IV) displayed in the Victor Pasmore Gallery. (Courtesy of the Victor Pasmore Estate)
UNTITLED [IV]
Oil paint on foamed aerated concrete in a wooden drawer, 34 x 125 x 12cm (without board), 53.5 x 145.5cm (without board), unsigned, undated
‘The great architectural sculpture, which I designed for Peterlee New Town, was a definite outcome of my experience in modifying and enlarging my Maltese house. Its great thick stone walls, heavy cubic forms and sculptural quality have been re-enacted and transformed into a tensile cantilevered structure in reinforced concrete.’
JASIA REICHARDT, ’PASMORE IN MALTA: SOME QUESTIONS POSED BY JASIA REICHARDT, ART INTERNATIONAL, VOL. 16 (1972).
LEFT: Victor Pasmore and the Peterlee Town Planning team, with the Apollo Pavilion in the background still under construction, 1969. (Courtesy of the Durham Records Office)
RIGHT: Victor Pasmore in front of the Apollo Pavilion, replete with graffitti, before its restoration. (Courtesy of the Durham Record Office)
REFLECTIONS ON PASMORE AND HIS MALTESE PEERS
There is much still to be said about Pasmore’s presence and artistic development during what was, arguably, the most artistically exciting, daring, and transformative in Malta’s modern cultural history. What follows here is just a brief comment on how Pasmore’s views and approach to painting aligned with those of some of the most pioneering Maltese modern artists active on the island, and what sort of interaction and exchange that was taking place in post-Second World War Malta—a scenario into which Pasmore, perhaps accidentally, stepped into.
Incidentally, by the time Pasmore took up permanent residence on the island, in 1966, several Maltese artists had already set their eyes on what the British artistic training centres had to offer. This first exchange, thus, happened at a foundational level to the emigrating Maltese artists themselves, even unknowingly to Pasmore. Indeed, during his teaching years as Director of Painting in the Department of Fine Art at the Universtiy of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, between 1954–1961, Pasmore played a pivotal role in developing and introducing a new educational programme on the teaching, method, and practice of art. It is precisely here—at this foundational level—that the first point of contact between some pioneering Maltese modern artists and the art, or rather ‘process’, of Victor Pasmore was made. It is worth remembering that, at the time, several Maltese artists were encouraged to study in British schools, gravitating away from Italian centres and from the outdated tradition of classical training at the Accademia, and especially
from the rigid and formal realism prevalent at the time. Pasmore had introduced an experimental programme on abstract studies called ‘Basic Forms’, later renamed more appropriately to ‘The Developing Process’.1 Artists such as Antoine Camilleri, Esprit Barthet, Frank Portelli, sculptor Tony Pace, Harry Alden, Joseph Lawrence Mallia, and Joseph Borg-Xuereb, in one way or another, had some direct contact to the British system and which, to some extent, transformed their vision and method of artistic creation.
‘The 1960s was a time of great experimentation in art’,2 muses Lawrence Mallia, who was increasingly leaning into abstraction and approaches that are largely revealing of the teaching practices of the time. Harry Alden, too, comments about the system where the mission was to generate ‘as many different opinions as possible’, which, however, ‘may have been conflicting and potentially confusing’.3 In other instances, Antoine Camilleri’s attempts at abstraction, or Barthet’s collage work and increasingly geometric compositions, or the assemblages of Tony Pace, or the transformation towards greater simplicity and the ‘breakdown’ of reality, as we observe in the works of Alden or Mallia, are just but a few ways in which Pasmore’s legacy indirectly intertwines with that of these artists. But nor were these artists stuck in a particular method or approach to art. Each went on to develop and transform that ‘language’, some even with a tireless experimentation and search for discovery that we also find in Pasmore’s parallel artistic journey.
Although Pasmore did not continue to formally teach in Malta, with his peers there would have undoubtedly been some form of exchange and transmission of ideas. Pasmore’s presence on the island, the contacts and friends he made here, his attendance to landmark exhibitions and even setting up his own exhibitions, inevitably led to a deep exchange on every level and to different degrees.
Pasmore also admired the work of artists like Gabriel Caruana, Josef Kalleya, Alfred Chircop, Pawl Carbonaro, Antoine Camilleri, and Caesar Attard, among several others. Indeed, works of these artists could even be found at his residence in Gudja. Nor was this relegated to the visual arts. There is, for example, Pasmore’s interest in the compositions of Mastro Charles Camilleri, as revealed through their correspondence, some of which was preserved amid the notes, diaries, and books left in Pasmore’s archive. With some of these artists and thinkers, such as Peter Serracino Inglott, and especially Richard England and Gabriel Caruana, we can also speak of a deep friendship, of shared worldviews, and of an intellectual and creative connection between thinkers, artists, and to an extent, mentors. The fact that these artists had in their possession the work of one another is a clear and direct sign of the admiration and esteem each one held for the other.
One would imagine that Pasmore’s move to Malta must have, at some level, also caused something of an identifiable change in him and his own art. The physical changes and adaptations that living in a different country bring with it, as well as the artistic and personal relations formed with artists, thinkers, and locals, could all have in their own way, and in part, guided Pasmore’s artistic explorations. There have been attempts to probe into what kind of impact such a move had on his art or to detect this change in the ‘surface bound medium’ of his art, that is, in some chromatic or morphological change in the colours or forms used.4 But if we were to stretch such interpretations of observable chromatic and formal changes in Pasmore’s later works to his time in Malta, would not this seem somewhat contradictory to Pasmore’s tireless quest for the ‘independence of painting’, the quest that sought to liberate and free the image?
Pasmore’s presence in Malta and his exchanges with Maltese artists may in themselves be considered as chance moments, at least initially, and so, not all that different from the spontaneous movements that partly shaped his works. But even then, those spontaneous movements were selected and directed by Pasmore to align with his quest to discover and liberate the image. That ‘chance moment’ was never quite about what it was or how it looked, but what it could become.5
So, rather than trying to see what changed in Pasmore’s art during his time in Malta, or that of his peers, it might benefit us more to look, instead, for signs of progression. How did Pasmore’s work continue to develop towards a goal—that is, the independence of painting—which remained a constant throughout the greater part of his career, even when the environment around him and the society he found himself in was drastically different?
Pasmore’s development was one bound to his ceaseless questioning of the world of relations: his students questioned him and with him, his artistic peers questioned him and with him, and even today, we stand before one of his works and cannot help but question: ‘What is the object over there?’6 and ‘By what means can we know?’.7 And perhaps it is such questions which form when two distinct realities come into contact with one another: questions that will take a lifetime to figure out. The abstract painting is just a fragment of it, one partial step of the way.
1 Richard Robin Yeomans, ‘The Foundation Course of Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton. 1954–1966’ (Ph.D thesis; Institute of Education, University of London, 1987), 6 and passim.
2 Joseph Paul Cassar, Conversations with 12 Maltese Artists (Malta: PIN, 2007).
3 Ibid.
4 Jasia Reichardt, ‘“Pasmore in Malta”: Some Questions Posed by Jasia Reichardt’, Art International, Vol. 16 (1972), 50.
5 Victor Pasmore, in The Space Within (1969).
6 From a title of one of Pasmore’s poems. One of his works, also produced as a print (1973), takes on this title as well.
7 From a title of one of Pasmore’s poems. One of his works, also produced as a print (1974), takes on this title as well.
BELOW: Victor Pasmore posing with Antoine Camilleri (centre) and Gabriel Caruana (right).
RIGHT: Victor Pasmore (right) visiting Josef Kalleya (left) at his studio. (Courtesy of the Josef Kalleya Family Archives)
‘The orientation of my work in the direction of topology, biology and psychology not only awakens emotional affinities with artists like Brancusi, Arp, Moore, Klee, Nicholson, Hepworth, Noguchi and Chillida; but also draws me into the orbit of surrealism—although only in its most abstract form, among the exponents of which Miró and Tanguy I find the most attractive.’
JASIA REICHARDT, ‘“PASMORE IN MALTA”: SOME QUESTIONS POSED BY JASIA REICHARDT’, ART INTERNATIONAL, VOL. 16 (1972).
BELOW: Victor Pasmore and Gabriel Caruana, with a variety of Caruana’s works displayed on the wall. (Courtesy of the Gabriel Caruana Foundation and Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London / Photo: John Pasmore)
OVERLEAF
Installing Victor Pasmore’s Apollo II: Ascending Development for his 1970 exhibition, The Space Within, at the Malta Society of Arts, Valletta. (Courtesy of the Victor Pasmore Estate)
RIGHT: Richard England (left), Victor Pasmore (centre), and Gabriel Caruana (right).
‘WHAT I HAVE DONE IS NOT THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTION FROM NATURE BUT A METHOD OF CONSTRUCTING FROM WITHIN.’
A
LOOK REFLECTIONS ON THE INDEPENDENCE OF PAINTING
To ‘construct from within’ is also to bestow the ‘object’, or painting, with a degree of freedom and independence from what is on the outside.
The works on display at the Victor Pasmore Gallery, largely produced at a time when Victor Pasmore was living in Malta between the 60s and the late 90s, are of the very same nature as those which led artist historian Herbert Read to dub Pasmore’s contribution to art as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’, back in the 1948.1
But what makes Pasmore’s venture into abstraction revolutionary? To understand this, we must take a look at where Pasmore was coming from—the works in this gallery only provide us with the tail end of the story, and since Pasmore’s artistic journey was one of continuous development and exploration, we have to necessarily consider those earlier, fundamental steps.
In many ways, there was nothing particularly ‘revolutionary’ about the earlier works of Pasmore, that is, his works up until the Second World War. Yet, there was always that hint of the revolutionary, that ever forward-looking approach that characterises even his latest work. Indeed, one might be forgiven for taking the arrow in Untitled [V] to signify just that: the work extends beyond the limits set by the physical and material reality of the painting. It spills over the edge, and takes you with it.
As from a young age, Pasmore considered Leonardo da Vinci and William Turner as the pillars on which to rest an outlook that would stay with him his entire life: ‘From Leonardo’, the artist explains, ‘I derived a respect for objective understanding, and from Turner, the urge for subjective freedom and the independence of painting’.2
On Turner, he continues, that:
By changing the content of painting from the perception of landscape illuminated from the outside, to the idea of landscape diffused and absorbed in the colour of light, Turner anticipated the Cubists by arriving at a world of ideas that could not be depicted by visual abstraction … Turner’s fragmentation of light into a composite of colours similarly had no visible reality.3
Leonardo and Turner, and everything in between. As an artist with no academic art school training, Pasmore devoted himself nonetheless to a serious study of the art of the Old Masters, but especially to Post-Impressionist theories: the writings and works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Paul Klee, Mondrian, among others.
It was also at this time that his own landscapes and figurative works started to become more tentative and ambiguous, displaying a greater interest in what constructs the visible rather than what is actually seen.
Then came, perhaps, a momentous event right after the Second World War, in 1946: a Picasso-Matisse exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which ushered in a ‘revolution’ within Pasmore’s work:
I saw this exhibition not so much as the destruction of naturalist art as a transformation of it. The message was at last clear—there could be no more turning back. Whatever the problems and shortcomings of modern painting, they had to be resolved in terms of both the evolution and revolution of modern thought. The only question was—the next step?4
The next step, for Pasmore, meant a renewed attempt at the complete independence of painting: ‘Rather than regard the Picasso explosion as the demand for a new representation of the visual world, therefore, I preferred to take the view that it was the signal for a renewed attempt at the complete independence of painting. Henceforth the relation between artist and nature would be intrinsic.’5
There is much to say about this relation between artist and nature. We will explore it here through one of the works on the Victor Pasmore Collection, Two Faces of the Turning World, which would seemingly contradict all that has been said so far about the independence of painting. This work is the most ‘representational’, the most subjectoriented, among the works of the collection.
Over and over, Pasmore maintained: ‘I consciously avoid being influenced by visual, optical scenery now— however much I think it beautiful … I’m not interested in “abstract” pictures of clouds, say, of the sea. Not one iota’.6 Indeed, asked repeatedly about the island’s light, colour and nature and its impact on his art, he would still hold on to that distance: ‘I have never made a print of rubble walls in Malta, unless it is an abstract drawing which gives that impression.’7
And yet, around this time we come across several stylised drawings of his own garden at Dar Ġamri, in Gudja, that evoke perhaps his much earlier paintings of gardens. After practically a career trying to free himself from the naturalist image or object, from cause or effect, to
process, how can we come to terms with such drawings or paintings like Two Faces of the Turning World?
One way of understanding this kind of ‘return’ to the figurative is if we consider other drawings—like the Massacre of the Innocent and, especially, A Crime of Ideas (1989)—a work based on Picasso’s own The Charnel House (1944–1945). This copy, or rather ‘free translation’ as Pasmore calls it, was ‘inspired by the desire to preserve the original image, the loss of which demonstrates the price which had to be paid for the modern demand for subjective independence’.8
In a way, these rather late drawings seem to throw light back on Pasmore’s own, long and patient exploration—a development that is built on processes rather than the effects or causes of nature. These works seem to unveil that original layer that was ‘lost’ in the process of a constructive, spontaneous, and free approach, in search of the independence of painting. Yet, it was a paradoxically ‘destructive’ approach, albeit being in search of the very same thing. In Two Faces of the Turning World these two distinct realities come together: on the one side, mankind at war; on the other, humanity in harmony with nature— the paradisiac return where the link is not so much with God but with nature. Curiously, in this work, Pasmore’s signature—his identity and, therefore, his journey—hangs in between.
1 Herbert Read on the exhibtion at the Redfern Gallery in 1948; quoted in Boris Ford, The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: Since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 104.
2 Alan Bowness and Luigi Lambertini, eds, Victor Pasmore. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Constructions, and Graphics, 1926–1979 (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 23.
3 Victor Pasmore on Turner’s Margate from the Sea, in The Artist’s Eye, exhibition catalogue (London: National Gallery, 1990).
4 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Transformation of Naturalist Art and the Independence of Painting’, in Bowness and Lambertini (1980), 100. Pasmore also refers to this exhibition in a letter to Ms Checkland, dated 4 August 1996.
5 Ibid.
6 Victor Pasmore, ‘What is Abstract Art?’, Sunday Times (1961), 3.
7 Pasmore (1988).
TWO FACES OF THE TURNING WORLD
charcoal on canvas and plywood, 122.5 x 183cm (without frame), 137 x 198cm (with frame), signed, undated (1990).
‘In the past, religious painting provided a link between sensibility and the mystery of God, but now the link is with Nature.’
VICTOR PASMORE, THE ARTIST’S EYE (1990).
UNTITLED [V]
oil paint, spray paint and graphite on plywood 105.5 x 105.5cm, signed, undated
‘Colour expresses something in itself. To start with one’s palette is quite different from following nature mechanically.’
VICTOR PASMORE, ‘WHAT IS ABSTRACT ART?’, THE SUNDAY TIMES (5 FEBRUARY 1961).
SPACE, LIFE AND TIME
oil paint, spray paint and graphite on canvas, 183 x 188cm (without frame), 188 x 193.5cm (with frame), signed, 1991
‘One of the principle legacies of
modern Science on
the art of Painting has been a new concept of space. The relativity of space and time, along with that of object and observer, led inevitably to the idea of four dimensions which destroyed the classical concept of visual representation and replaced it with an abstract and ambiguous condition which requires a completely different image.’
VICTOR PASMORE, ‘ART AS A FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS’ (1999).
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
Oil paint and spray paint on plywood, 121 x 181cm, signed, undated (1992) (Private Collection)
THE PERMANENT COLLECTION ITS FOUNDATION AND HISTORY
The Victor Pasmore Foundation was set up in Malta in July 2012 by Pasmore’s wife, Wendy, and his two children, John and Mary Ellen (Nice), to conserve and promote the art of Victor Pasmore as a significant testimony to twentieth-century art and as an important element in Malta’s artistic patrimony.
In 2014, the Pasmore Foundation signed an agreement with the Central Bank of Malta to host a permanent exhibition within its historic premises at the Polverista Gallery, adjacent to the Central Bank of Malta Annexe, in Valletta, to present the life and works of Pasmore to the public. The gallery was originally a polverista, or gunpowder magazine, constructed during the time of the Order of St John, and which was later rebuilt during the British period.
In September 2015, Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti took over the management of the collection with the intention of bringing to light the importance of Pasmore and the Maltese modern art movement. The Gallery was closed for refurbishment and reopened to the public in May 2016. In March 2020, the collection was placed in temporary storage, treated and restored until its relocation to the new premises at APS House 275, St Paul Street, four years later in the Spring of 2024.
THE VICTOR PASMORE GALLERY THE NEW PREMISES
In 1914, APS Bank moved its headquarters and members’ club from Palazzo Caraffa on St Christopher Street, in Valletta, to a more centrally located space in the capital city on St Paul Street. The building would come to be known as APS House, and the bank occupied the premises until the early twenty-first century, when it relocated to Republic Street.
In 2021, APS entered into an agreement with Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti to transform their old headquarters into a state-of-the-art gallery which would house the Victor Pasmore collection.
From its new location, the Victor Pasmore Gallery continues its mission to care for Pasmore’s work through an engaging display as well as a varied programme of events and temporary exhibitions showcasing the work of Malta’s most significant twentieth-century artists. Apart from exhibitions, the purpose of the Gallery is to research, assist, and participate in the realisation of further studies into Pasmore’s work and in new ways of engaging with his important cultural and artistic legacy on Malta and on his Maltese peers.
The Victor Pasmore Gallery was restored and renovated with the generous financial assistance of The Malta Airport Foundation.
The Board of Governors of Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti would like to thank the following for their generous support
ASSOCIATES
APS Bank
Malta Airport Foundation
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Atlas Insurance
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Mr Jean Claude Gandur
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Mr & Mrs Andrew Hamish Forsyth
PATRONS
PERSONAL
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Antes Insurance Brokers Ltd – Mr Kevin Galea Pace
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Gianpula – Dr Roger de Giorgio
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GVZH Advocates – Dr Michael Grech
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Lombard Bank Malta plc – Mr Joseph Said
Mapfre Middlesea plc – Mr Martin Galea
Miller Distributors Ltd – Mr Malcolm G. Miller
O. F. Gollcher and Sons Ltd – Mr Karl Gollcher
PwC – Mr David Valencia
RiskCap International Ltd – Dr Paul Magro
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