Victor Pasmore once told me how he greeted Pablo Picasso at Victoria station. The great man had come to Britain in 1950 to attend a communist-sponsored peace congress in Sheffield. In person Pasmore found him surprisingly different from the solemn art-historical giant suggested by books. ‘He did nothing but joke all the time, non-stop, and he was no more a communist than the local fairy.’ Instead, Pasmore felt, ‘Picasso was 100 per cent anarchist.’
Something similar could be said about Pasmore himself, as can be seen from a fine exhibition devoted to his work from the 1930s to the ’60s at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham (moving on to Pallant House, Chichester, on 11 March). Few artists made more abrupt stylistic swerves. Consequently, his career was a thesaurus of all the possibilities open to a 20th-century painter, from dingy social realism to millenarian modernism.
Pasmore (1908–98) began, he explained, as a ‘sort of impressionist’, subsequently dabbling briefly with ‘imitation cubist and fauvist pictures’. This flirtation with the avant-garde seemed to lead nowhere, so ‘I gave it up and went back to the old masters.’ In 1937, with two friends, William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, Pasmore founded the hugely influential Euston Road School, dedicated to carefully calibrated depictions of their mid-century British surroundings. But he shied away from that orthodoxy too.
The first pictures in the exhibition, dating from the 1930s, are somewhat in the manner of Sickert or Degas. Next, during and immediately after the war, Pasmore produced swooningly romantic landscapes — then suddenly turned to abstraction. For a while after that he concentrated on geometric sculptural constructions, and at one point designed a whole neighbourhood of a New Town — Peterlee in County Durham — before returning to abstract painting.
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