Martin Gayford

Shape shifter | 12 January 2017

His career was a thesaurus of all the possibilities open to a 20th-century painter, as this exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery shows

issue 14 January 2017

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’.

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