Victor Pasmore: The Final Decades

from Victor Pasmore: The Final Decades

Works in the Exhibition

Martin Gayford

In one of art history’s more unexpected encounters, Victor Pasmore once met Pablo Picasso at Victoria Station. The celebrated Spaniard was visiting Britain to take part in a World Peace Congress in Sheffield. Pasmore was delegated to greet him as he stepped off the boat train 'quite a small chap with a huge suitcase, bigger than himself’ and found the great artist’s personality quite different from what he had expected.

‘He did nothing but joke all the time, non-stop,’ Pasmore remembered. ‘When we were driving past the National History Museum in the taxi he asked, “What's that?,”’ Pasmore explained and Picasso responded, ‘Ha! La Musée de nature morte!’ [that is, in French, the museum of still life but also of dead nature]. ‘Picasso,’ Pasmore concluded, ‘Was 100% anarchist, out of Barcelona, whatever it was he had to be the opposite.’ In that respect, perhaps the two artists had something in common. Pasmore himself was a serial dissident, even from orthodoxies he himself had established.

Pasmore (1908-1998) had one of the most complicated, not to say convoluted, career trajectories in British art. If you plotted his stylistic progression on a diagram, you might end up with a long, meandering line. An itinerary, that is, rather like those depicted in paintings such as Linear Composition, 1962, which wander here and there, doubling back on themselves. Over a long lifetime he was an impressionist, post-impressionist, realist, abstract artist in the manner of Paul Klee, constructivist, and sculptor of three-dimensional reliefs and installations before settling into the signature manner of his final decades, the period during which the works in this exhibition were made. The question then arises: was there any consistency in the art he produced prolifically over seven decades?

Pasmore began on as a fairly conventional, representational painter he later described his early work as impressionist though fauvist would be a better label. In 1934 he took part in an exhibition entitled Objective Abstraction, held in 1934 at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. Some of the works by Rodrigo Moynihan and Geoffrey Tibble would almost qualify as Abstract Expressionist. Pasmore himself described these works as ‘Tachiste sort of stuff.’ Few of the artists involved stayed with this manner for long.

‘You can do about a dozen of those brush-stroke pictures, and that's about it. You wonder what's going to happen next. We came to the conclusion that there was no future in it, that it was far too subjective, totally subjective. So we needed something to get back to an objective standpoint.’

Pasmore and his friend William Coldstream found this in a manner that came to be known as Euston Road (the name derived from a private art academy off that street in London which the artists set up). The guiding principle of Euston Road, as propounded by Pasmore’s friends Coldstream and Claude Rogers, was carefully measuring the precise location of each element in a picture. It was an attempt to depict the world in a sober, dispassionate, unromantic manner: not how they felt about it, just what was definitely there.

In the politicised context of the 1930s, this was a British version of socialist realism. Or it was for the others. Typically, Pasmore opted out of that on the grounds that he had to work for a living. ‘I was in an office, working full-time, so I had no time to monkey about with politics.’ He just wanted to devote the time he had to what he called ‘pure painting.’ And he succeeded. By the early 1940s, Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery, London, was describing him as one of the finest painters in the country.

In a way, Pasmore’s Thames landscapes of the mid-40s, which made him famous, stuck to the Euston Road programme. Christopher Stevens has establishing that The Quiet River: The Thames at Chiswick (1943–4), one of Pasmore’s mid-career masterpieces, is so topographically accurate that its viewpoint on the riverbank is still easy to find. On the other hand, its spirit is not doggedly factual, but delicately, swooningly romantic.

Gillian Ayres, who was taught by Pasmore, Rogers, and Coldstream at Camberwell School during the late 40s, remembered him as ‘intelligent, and wayward.’ His friends ‘all saw him as a sort of genius, but he was up to things in the middle of them all, I wouldn't define him as Euston Road.’ Something strange began to occur in Pasmore’s work, the meticulously observed subject seemed to dematerialise. In The Gardens of Hammersmith No. 2, the riverside location is still just about visible, but the Thames itself has disappeared leaving just the contours of bare, wintery trees and rounded shrubs represented by swarms of dots. The marks in paintings of this period are analogous to those in works from decades later.

The softly fuzzy green mases which make up The Park (1947–8), for example, are strikingly similar to those to be seen in Wandering Journey (1985) or Green Development in Two Movements (1989).

The same sensibility is clearly at work, except that the earlier picture is a depiction of a real landscape and the others explicitly are not. How then did the latter works come about? Asked in 1995 how he began a picture, Pasmore gave a revealing answer:

‘I used to be a landscape painter, like the old masters. How I start now, I don't know really. Technically my current things are very quick to do. If you are painting the Battle of Waterloo it takes a long time to paint and draw. But especially when I use spray paint it is very rapid. So most of the time is spent in thinking about the thing.’

Intriguingly, he gave a similar answer to a questionnaire given to each of the participants in the Objective Abstraction exhibition of 1934. In response to the query, 'Have you a clear conception of the painting before you begin? Does it grow while working?,' he replied: 'I have only an uncertain idea before I begin. I proceed as the painting demands until I have realised it in as complete and satisfying a form as I can.'

To Pasmore his development had a certain inner consistency. ‘Even when I was sixteen and an Impressionist painter, what I liked about impressionism was that you were doing something with a brush, independently, making brushstrokes. Even though I was painting in front of a landscape, making these brushstrokes, I was conscious that I was making a painting—an independent object. I've stuck to that throughout.’

This, indeed, was his starting point. His impulse to become an artist had come from family visits to the Tate Gallery. ‘My mother used to take us there, and I became fascinated not by the great romantic Turners, but by the late ones: the Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth and the Interior at Petworth. These pictures struck me. You only saw what they were when you looked at the title. Before that, you just saw the painting. That's what started me off.’

In a way, that was what he was always after in his own work. Pasmore remained the same intuitive, instinctive artist over sixty or seventy years. But the appearance of what he made changed radically: abstract in 1934, then figurative over a decade, then militantly abstract. Much of his work was geometric and constructivist in 50s and early 60s. Then he returned to painting, almost as abruptly as he had switched from romantic realism to abstraction fifteen years before. His long, final phase had begun.

But how describe the works from these later years? There is no handy label such as ‘Euston Road’ or ‘Constructivist’ (even though, as we’ve seen, these don’t quite fit). When I talked to Pasmore in 1995, he explained thought ‘abstract’ was ‘a very bad word’ to describe what he did. Then he added, I call it independent painting: that is, art that is independent like music.

The musical parallel was evidently in his mind when he gave titles to a number of later paintings such as Symphony in Maroon and Five Colours, Grey Symphony, Black Rhythm or Green Development in Two Movements. But Pasmore pointed out, these and other titles were added after the work was finished. Responding to the suggestion that a picture such as Untitled (1990) or The Milky Way (1987) might put viewers in mind of stars or interstellar space, his answer was firm.

‘If people want to think they look like stars, as far as I'm concerned that's OK. I don't mind what they think it looks like. But not for me, I've no interest in representing any outside, extraneous object.’

However, as the conversation developed, it turned out that his position was more subtle and complex. ‘Great art,’ he mused, ‘must include the mind, and the weakness of pure painting is that it has not got an extraneous idea in it.’ Such a picture would have what he called ‘an intrinsic idea in terms of line, form, tone or colour.’

If possible, he liked to meld an additional idea to the which, he explained often happened afterwards, ‘What I've done suggests the idea.’ But then he immediately went on to add that this was not always the case, ‘Admittedly, I might think of an idea first, and think of an abstract form that might suit it.’

It is not hard to detect the same sensibility in paintings by Pasmore from widely different eras. His landscape of the 1940s reveal a tendency to punctuate large, soft masses of colour with sharp linear mars. You see much the same in a picture from forty years later such as The River's Edge, 1988.

This is not to say, however, that he did not experience Damascene revelations which sent him off on a fresh path. As it happens, one of these was an encounter not with Picasso himself, but with his work. As he recalled in 1995:

‘There was an exhibition of Picasso at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945, of what he'd done in Paris during the War, these absolutely outrageous pictures. I went to this exhibition, of course already knew about Picasso having imitated him before in '30s. But when I saw this again, I didn't like it. But what came to me absolutely clearly, like a flash, was that Picasso had torpedoed the entire Renaissance tradition, from Leonardo to Cézanne. It was out. I thought to myself, well what on earth am I going to do? I've got to start again.’

This was the root of his notorious shift into abstraction. But about a decade later Pasmore received another impulse from a most unlikely source. Late one evening in 1955, he got a telephone call around 11 pm. The voice on the phone announced, ‘My name's Williams, the general manager of the Peterlee New Town. Can I come and see you?’ I said, ‘What, next week?’ He said, ‘No I want to see you now.’ So Williams came round about midnight and explained the problem he had. The project at Peterlee had been planned by Berthold Lubetkin, the leading Modernist architect working in Britain, but after repeated clashes with the National Coal Board, Lubetkin had resigned, leaving the project to the local architect, who was, as Pasmore put it, ‘building the same old stuff, a council housing estate.’

In the end, Pasmore was given an entire sector of the town to arrange, plotting the course of roads, designing the outer forms of buildings like Constructivist sculpture. Effectively, he was drawing curves over the site, while breaking up the regimented box-like forms of the buildings. ‘The advantage I had was that I'd been a landscape painter, so I knew about environment, walking through the countryside.’

In the end, he tired of this new career, announcing in 1964 that, ‘I'm prepared to accept that my own bent and training as not as a sculptor or architect. I'm returning to painting because I find I can go further with it.’ But his involvement with Peterlee had changed his feeling for space.

‘As a classical artist one works within a closed rectangle. From Leonardo right up to Cézanne and even Picasso it's in a closed space. But the new space is open, in cases I put forms right outside the rectangle. This has been a big step in my pure painting. The trouble with poor old Mondrian was that he couldn't get out of it. This is very important, for me. You are still painting in the rectangle, but you've got to be able to get out of it as well.’

That’s what he was doing in paintings such as Brown Development, 1968, The Paradox of Progress, 1984, and Green Development in Two Movements, 1989 and also in some of his large-scale murals. And in a wider sense, like many artists, Pasmore spent his life escaping from various boxes. He’d given up his constructivist reliefs and architectural work, he explained in 1988, because it was ‘too limiting.’ That’s why he returned to painting, ‘there you can be slightly ambiguous.’ In Pasmore’s view, one of the qualities that made Picasso such a good artist was his willingness to contradict himself.

‘I think he was a complete hotchpotch. Guernica is a great painting just because it's a synthesis of cubism and surrealism the two opposites. Picasso started off as a rationalist, a completely rational thing. Then Surrealism came along, the dream, and Picasso cottoned onto this. Guernica is a synthesis of the two.’

Similarly, his works may have been ‘independent’ not depictions of any ‘extraneous object,’ but that doesn’t mean that they had no subject. ‘Art,’ Pasmore insisted ‘must include the world of ideas as well as the world of sensations.’ He wanted them to harmonise with the yin and yang of existence.

‘Human life in its emotional terms, tragic and joyful. It's a double thing. I believe nature is an interaction of opposites. Great art is a symbol of life in both those terms.’

At their best, his late paintings achieve that aspiration. They seem like nature without being images of anything specific in nature. Perhaps that’s what he saw on those boyhood visits to see Turner at the Tate.