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Lot Essay
‘It was taken for granted among the avant-garde that the most important event in British painting since the war was Victor Pasmore’s conversion, in 1948, to abstraction.’
- John Russell
Pasmore’s conversion to abstract art in 1948 had a seismic impact on British art. It is hard to comprehend the level of animosity felt between the representational and abstract artists at the time. Pasmore was one of the founding members of the Euston Road School, an institution dedicated to acute representational painting and the antithesis of abstract art. If he could be seduced by abstraction, what hope did his followers have?
Abstract in Indian Red, Crimson, Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink and Orange is an incredibly rare, pivotal painting. Completed in 1950, the composition demonstrates Pasmore’s assurance with abstraction and a distinct development from his first tentative canvases and collages of the preceding years. The geometric forms in the lower half of the canvas owe a clear debt to Paul Klee and appear to represent a landscape with a horizon, above which floats the sun, or moon, or possibly both in the form of an eclipse. Pasmore explained that he incorporated geometric forms ‘not because I wish to create a geometric art, but because these forms, being already abstracted from nature and universally recognised, have become concrete elements in themselves and, as such, lend themselves to free interpretation by the painter. In this respect, they resemble the elements of music which are not drawn from any sounds, but from carefully selected and controlled notes produced from specially constructed instruments. Thus, the painter who uses such forms must proceed, like the musician, from a limited scale to a complex construction...’ (V. Pasmore, quoted in ‘The Artist Speaks’, Art News and Review, Vol 3, No. 2, 24 February 1951, p. 3).
- John Russell
Pasmore’s conversion to abstract art in 1948 had a seismic impact on British art. It is hard to comprehend the level of animosity felt between the representational and abstract artists at the time. Pasmore was one of the founding members of the Euston Road School, an institution dedicated to acute representational painting and the antithesis of abstract art. If he could be seduced by abstraction, what hope did his followers have?
Abstract in Indian Red, Crimson, Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink and Orange is an incredibly rare, pivotal painting. Completed in 1950, the composition demonstrates Pasmore’s assurance with abstraction and a distinct development from his first tentative canvases and collages of the preceding years. The geometric forms in the lower half of the canvas owe a clear debt to Paul Klee and appear to represent a landscape with a horizon, above which floats the sun, or moon, or possibly both in the form of an eclipse. Pasmore explained that he incorporated geometric forms ‘not because I wish to create a geometric art, but because these forms, being already abstracted from nature and universally recognised, have become concrete elements in themselves and, as such, lend themselves to free interpretation by the painter. In this respect, they resemble the elements of music which are not drawn from any sounds, but from carefully selected and controlled notes produced from specially constructed instruments. Thus, the painter who uses such forms must proceed, like the musician, from a limited scale to a complex construction...’ (V. Pasmore, quoted in ‘The Artist Speaks’, Art News and Review, Vol 3, No. 2, 24 February 1951, p. 3).