[157176] Newcastle : Laing Art Gallery - Linear Motif in Black and White

Laing Art Gallery, Higham Place, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

 

Linear Motif in Black and White.

Victor Pasmore (1908-1998).

Oil and incised lines on plywood and strawboard, 1959-60.

 

Pasmore visited Ben Nicholson in St Ives in 1950, and soon afterwards followed Nicholson's example in making relief paintings. These reliefs relate to his work with architects and town-planners (he was a consultant architectural designer for the new town of Peterlee from 1955-77). Here, Pasmore takes painting into real, three-dimensional space and conceives the frame - and the space beyond it - as an integral part of the work.

 

Victor Pasmore was a painter, printmaker, and maker of constructions who is unusual in having achieved eminence as both a figurative and an abstract artist. After early experiments with abstraction he reverted to naturalistic painting, and in 1937 he combined with William Coldstream and Claude Rogers in forming the Euston Road School. Characteristic of his work at this time and in the early 1940s are some splendid female nudes and lyrically sensitive Thames-side landscapes that have been likened to those of Whistler. In the late 1940s he underwent a dramatic conversion to pure abstract art, and by the early 1950s he had developed a personal style of geometrical abstraction.

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