Visual Arts: Tying the century together

When Victor Pasmore turned to abstraction in 1948 it was hailed as the most revolutionary event in post-war British art. Now retrospectives of his paintings and prints in Liverpool and London reveal how and why it happened.

The debate between realism and abstraction, or between "the mirror and the square", as it was dubbed in 1952, was the main preoccupation of British artists and commentators in the middle years of this century. Victor Pasmore, who died aged 90 last year, was central to it.

To his fans he was a major figure: one of the grand old men of 20th-century British art, an important teacher and even more important painter, whose work ties the two halves of the century together with a thread of pure joy. To his critics, he was simply boring: a rather fuzzy painter of Frenchified interiors who turned from dull figuration to even duller abstraction. The truth, as is usually the case, is probably somewhere in between.

There are two exhibitions celebrating his memory at the moment - one at Marlborough Fine Art in London, his representatives for nearly 40 years; the other at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool - and it's almost as if each has been curated to prove one side of the argument. In Liverpool he looks good, while in London he doesn't, but aspects of both exhibitions are crucial to the bigger picture.

Pasmore turned to abstraction in 1948, a shift described by Herbert Read as "the most revolutionary event in post-war British art". Rather more revolutionary things have happened since, but at the time Read had a point: Pasmore was the great hope of figurative art; the golden boy of Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, and a fine, measured painter in the mould of Degas mixed with Manet and, closer to home, with Sickert. The best of these works (his Parisian cafe of 1936, or a little nude curled on an unmade bed, both in the Liverpool show) have a wonderful quality - a low-toned, slightly blurred luminosity that manages to conjure life out of shadows.

His sense of tone and colour was always faultless, and there's a sort of English good taste running through all his early paintings. When these pictures work, they work really well, though in the London selection they lack the resonance of which he was capable. Some aren't helped by being a little dirty and others, as you might expect from a show predominantly gathered from the artist's estate, look unfinished, and I'd question whether he ever intended them to leave the studio.

That said, many of his most successful, and definitely "finished" paintings, have a sort of unfinished look to them. Pictures such as The Park and The Gardens of Hammersmith, both painted in the late Forties, are full of empty space and half-scratched lines - the marks of a man editing and abbreviating the landscape into his own scheme. They are glimmering, shimmering paintings that owe something to pointillism and to the example of Klimt and Klee, yet, for all these half- suggested influences, the end results have an originality that was all too rare in the English art of the time.

Herbert Read described Pasmore's shift from figuration as a revolutionary moment but, in fact, looking at these works and even at The Quiet River: The Thames at Chiswick, painted as early as 1943, the passage to abstraction seems inevitable. In the Liverpool exhibition, at least, you can see it coming as the work becomes increasingly structured throughout the decade with strong vertical and horizontal elements beginning to define his overall design. In The Quiet River, the order is imposed over Whistlerian harmonies of blue and grey (that's the great James McNeill Whistler, not Rex, as the Tate's accompanying publication rather bizarrely suggests), by the patterns of blocks and lines made by the breakwater and posts in the mud.

These pictures that pre-date Pasmore's abstraction, and those that he made in 1950 and 1951, immediately after the turn, are the greatest of his 70-year career. In 1950 he visited Ben Nicholson in St Ives and, inspired perhaps by the waves and skies that he found there, he embarked upon a series of paintings in which the picture surface is covered by dense groups of spirals and swirling lines. They are powerful images, completely abstract, yet tied somehow to the natural world and to the broader traditions of English art, particularly to Turner, for whom he had a great admiration. Pasmore gave these works two-part titles, such as Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea, and Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, pointing to a dual potential: on one hand the possibility of a thing, a snowstorm, on the other, an exercise in pattern-making.

He abandoned the spiral in 1952 on the grounds that it couldn't adequately express "modern conceptions of space", and so embarked on a rather self- conscious search for what he described as "an objective basis for the art of tomorrow". He was joined in this by Kenneth and Mary Martin, Anthony Hill and Adrian Heath, who together pursued a Constructivist approach, building three-dimensional works from plywood, Perspex and Formica. They look dated now, if occasionally poetic in the balance of form and colour and small shifts and subtleties of different widths and depths of wood, but mostly they lack the intellectual rigour of first-generation Constructivists such as Naum Gabo, or even Pasmore's friend Nicholson. Pasmore wrote at length about the kinship between Constructivism and music, but most of his own works of this kind are oddly silent.

The vocabulary of these constructions continued to inform his art, and the possibilities of a third dimension became a key component of his work for the next 40 years. His work became increasingly linear, with Mir a constant presence - a spidery line travelling to and from amorphous blocks of colour, but often breaking free from the structure imposed by a central section in relief. His etchings in this vein (and there is a separate exhibition devoted to his prints at Marlborough Graphics, as well as a good group of them in Liverpool) often seem rather more resolved than the paintings. It's a scale thing, perhaps, but also the discipline of print-making: the line journeying from A to B, contained by, and yet escaping from, the page.

Occasionally, and increasingly as we move into his later works, the line makes figurative and naturalistic suggestions: a bird, an aeroplane followed by a spray-canned trail, an eye, or a smile spreading from left to right - often ending in a large signature, "VP", itself a part of the overall design. Sometimes the line starts to curl round on itself, back into the spiral form of his most successful abstract paintings. A suggestion, perhaps, that he never totally gave it up, as Ben Nicholson noted on a postcard in 1966, sent with a cutting from a newspaper showing the whorls and loops of fingerprint types and the message: "What about these variations on a theme?"

The Liverpool exhibition has been carefully selected to show Pasmore's progression, his linear development as he would have had it, and it looks like a clean and clear path to the portentously titled Space, Light and Four Dimensions of 1992-5. In London, however, it's not such a resolved story. There are a number of late works that show him lapsing into an uneasy kind of figuration and revisiting the world of spirals that had been so successful 40 years before, but with little people and boats thrown into what has become, unambiguously, a swirling sea. In a sense the unevenness of much of the work at Marlborough, and these late flashbacks, give a truer picture of his enduring struggle between the mirror and the square.

Tate Gallery Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool (enquiries: 0151-702 7400/ information line: 0151-702 7402) to March 2000. Marlborough Gallery, 6 Albemarle Street, London W1 (0171-629 5161) to 30 Jul