Victor Pasmore R.A. (British, 1908-1998)
Relief Construction in White, Black, Brown and Maroon
signed with initials and dated 'VP./1954' (verso)
painted wood construction
122 x 122 cm. (48 x 48 in.) (including the artist's box frame)
Constructed in 1954
Footnotes:
Provenance
With Marlborough Fine Art London,
James H. Clark, Dallas, Texas
With Clark Gallery, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 3 February 1982, where acquired by the family of the present owner
Private Collection, U.S.A

Writing in 1965 on the occasion of Pasmore's Tate retrospective Ronald Alley opens his catalogue introduction with the statement that 'the conversion of Victor Pasmore to abstract art was one of the most dramatic events in post-war British art' (exh.cat., Victor Pasmore, Tate, London, 1965).

Pasmore's conversion, which rather poetically coincided with the approach of the century's mid-point, was so dramatic because it was so stark. Within his output hitherto he had seemingly nailed his colours to the mast of representational painting. He was a leading figure in the Euston Road and Camberwell schools and, as such, strongly associated with a credence of high observation. By comparison his output from 1950 onwards consists almost entirely of pure abstraction, interrogating fundamental concerns of space and materiality. Whilst his work from both periods was celebrated contemporaneously and continues to be so today, any alignment between the two isn't immediately clear. However, a parallel can be found in a series of early important constructed reliefs, of which the present work is a fine example.

It is important to note that whilst throughout the 1930s and 1940s Pasmore's own output was representational, he did not reject abstraction. As early as 1934 he exhibited work within the Objective Abstractions exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery, which set to promote British abstraction. Whilst Pasmore's submissions included depictive scenes, within an interview reprinted in the exhibition catalogue he disclosed an embryonic separation between his work and depiction - 'I do not paint directly from nature; I endeavour to paint in relation to natural forms' (quoted in exh.cat., Victor Pasmore, Tate, London, 1965, under cat.no.5). Following this exhibition, he produced a small number of abstractions, but dissatisfied with the results, did not exhibit the works and would later destroy them. Pasmore was also highly engaged with the work of Ben Nicholson, Britain's leading abstract painter of the interwar years. He acquired one of Nicholson's famous White Reliefs, and visited him in St Ives.

Pasmore began to revisit abstraction in 1947 but the catalyst for his switch from engagement to devotion – especially to the form of construction, came in early 1951. He was loaned a copy of the 1948 book Art as The Evolution of Visual Knowledge by the American artist Charles Biederman. Pasmore and Biederman, who specifically championed construction as an art form, engaged in a lively exchange of letters and by the following year Pasmore would write –'The problem of giving comprehensible shape to new concepts has been the constant occupation of artists in the last hundred years...today however; abstract art enters a phase of construction.' (Victor Pasmore, 'Abstract, Concrete and Subjective Art', Broadsheet 2, July 1952).

Constructed reliefs became Pasmore's primary concern from this point for more than a decade to follow. He submitted examples to several era-defining exhibitions, including those held at Adrian Heath's 22 Fitzroy Street Studio (1952 and 1953) and Redfern Gallery's Nine Abstract Artists (1955). Pasmore's constructions were deemed highly successful – with publications such as The Times declaring them – 'ravishingly beautiful, standing among the finest things of their kind – paintings as well as constructions – produced anywhere during the last 40 years' (The Times, June 1955, quoted in Alastair Grieve, Victor Pasmore, Tate Publishing, London, 2010, p.68).

By 1954 Pasmore's approach to constructed reliefs had been clarified into two types; a vertical series and a horizontal series. It is the second of these to which the present work belongs, and to which we can look to find parallels with the first part of his career. Pasmore confirmed himself that the origin of the horizontal constructed reliefs lay with his majestic river scenes of the mid-1940s, and if we look, for example, at his 1947 painting View of Cambridge (also known as Cam from Magdalene Bridge, Cambridge, No 1, Private Collection) the connection is easily traced.

In the 1947 painting, Pasmore has used a centrally positioned chimney and building and their respective reflections to divide the composition vertically in half. He has then balanced the tonal impact of left and right by rendering certain elements vividly, whilst softening others to a similar tonal note of the sky, river, and bank. He has utilised the reflections of building and boats to find a rhythmic stacking of elements which draws one's eye up the composition from the fore.

In the series of horizontal constructed reliefs he employs these exact same techniques, albeit in a very different manner. The composition is similarly divided in half but by a vertical bar. The two stacks of horizontal elements either side are loosely aligned with an imprecision reminiscent of the watery reflections of the earlier paintings. Overall balance is achieved by the inclusion of two larger block forms in opposing positions, their contrasting tone is then supplemented by heavier or lighter use of impact within the further elements. Across the series, the palette of highlights selected - notes of Indian red, maroon, brown, lilac, ochre, and vermillion - further references his river pictures.

The dates of the horizontal constructed reliefs range from the summer of 1954, through to 1958, with a dozen such examples traced including those now in the Tate Gallery, Walker Art Gallery and British Council collections. Examples from the series were shown by Pasmore at This is Tomorrow (I.C.A., 1956), at the 1960 Venice Biennale, his major Tate retrospective of 1965 and more recently as part of Pallant House's 2017 Pasmore exhibition and the Barbican's current Postwar Modern survey. Relief Construction in White, Black, Brown and Maroon is one of the earliest known examples from this important series, and has resided in private American collections since its acquisition at the Marlborough Gallery.
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