Victor Pasmore R.A.

(British, 1908-1998)

Abstract in Brown, White, Pink and Ochre 68.1 x 83.8 cm. (27 x 33 in.) (including the artist's backboard) Painted in 1951-2

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist
With Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, May 1959, where purchased by
Sir Martyn Beckett
His sale; Christie's, London, 8 June 2001, lot 157
With Jonathan Clark & Co, London, 14 September 2001, where purchased by
Ross D. Siragusa Jr., from whom acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Victor Pasmore Paintings and Construction 1944-1954, March-May 1954, cat.no.22 (as Oval Motif No. 2, 1951)
Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery, Victor Pasmore: Selected Works 1926-1954, February-March 1955, cat.no.29
London, Redfern Gallery, Victor Pasmore, June 1955, cat.no.16
London, Arts Council Gallery, Three Masters of Modern British Painting, 1958, cat.no.37 (as Oval Motif in White, Brown, Pink and Maroon)
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Today and Yesterday, February 1959, cat.no.7
London, Tate Gallery, Victor Pasmore Retrospective Exhibition 1925-65, 14 May-27 June 1965, cat.no.103 (as Oval Motif in Brown, White, Pink and Ochre No.2)
Bradford, Cartwright Hall, Victor Pasmore, organised by Arts Council of Great Britain, 2 February-9 March 1980, cat.no.22; this exhibition travelled to Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 15 March-11 May, Norwich, University of East Anglia, Sainsbury Centre, 20 May-15 June, Leicester, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, 21 June-20 July, Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, 26 July-25 August and London, Royal Academy, Diploma Galleries, 13 September-19 October 1980

Literature
Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, Alec Tiranti Ltd., London, 1954, pl.45
Alan Bowness and Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Constructions and Graphics 1926-1979, Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, cat.no.173, p.103 (col.ill)

Only a handful of abstract works by Victor Pasmore dating from the first half of the 1950s have appeared at auction over the past thirty or so years. They are incredibly rare. Abstract in Brown, White, Pink and Ochre (1951-2) dates to the earliest part of the decade and is accompanied with impressive exhibition history, having been included in the artist's major Tate retrospective in 1965 amongst other shows.

Like Ben Nicholson (who was fourteen years his senior) during the early 1920s, Pasmore had flirted with abstraction at a specific moment in the early 1930s before he founded the Euston Road School. He joined the London Artists' Association in 1933 and with Sir William Coldstream and Claude Rogers participated in Zwemmer Gallery's notable 1934 show, Objective Abstractions. Only, Pasmore's contribution to the exhibition was not abstract but instead showed the influence of the Fauves and Cubists; Matisse and Picasso being the sources of his early inspiration. Unfortunately, the handful of abstract works Pasmore produced following the show, partly guided by Ben Nicholson's new avant-garde approach to his painting, were destroyed by him. As the decade wore on and Pasmore established his teaching, first at Fitzroy Street then Euston Road, pupils were directed to the naturalistic aesthetic of Degas, Cézanne, Sickert and Bonnard. Up until the mid-1940s this is the direction Pasmore's painting travelled in, but as the war drew to an end, experimentation began to re-appear. His Hammersmith paintings of the late 1940s show evidence of his interest in Seurat's Pointillism and Cezanne's later work with the use of multiple perspectives. Despite this, Pasmore felt unconvinced with his progress, and Ronald Alley in his introduction to Tate's retrospective exhibition describes the change which then occurred:

'Therefore, in 1948 he decided to make a fresh start with abstract art and to explore all its possibilities in a completely scientific way, finding out what happened when one started with a square or a spiral or so on. He read the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Arp and the other leading abstract artists, just as he had previously read those by the post-impressionists, and even made a compilation Abstract Art: Comments by some Artists and Critics, which was privately printed at the Camberwell School of Art in 1949. Knowledge of the post-war Parisian and American abstract movements had not reached England at the time and Pasmore's development was completely independent of them.' (Ronald Alley, Victor Pasmore, Retrospective exhibition 1925-65, Tate Publishing, 1965).

To begin with, Pasmore's abstraction involved collages and two-dimensional paintings such as the present work with its complex colours, shapes and forms encased within an oval as a reflection on his dissatisfaction with the closed rectangle of easel painting. The first constructed reliefs had begun to appear by 1948 and were exhibited at Fitzroy Street in March 1952 and Redfern Gallery in May of the same year. Many of these and other works were sadly destroyed by the artist and opportunities to acquire examples such as Abstract in Brown, White, Pink and Ochre seldom present themselves.