Triangular Motif

Pasmore's conversion to abstract art - that which does not depict recognisable objects - was one of the most dramatic artistic events of the period immediately after the Second World War. Amongst his work prior to this period were river scenes, partly inspired by Turner (1775-1851) - Pasmore was then a successful landscape painter. In the late 1940s he tried to give to his pictures a satisfactory geometric structure of their own. His first abstracts were all oil paintings but he began to make extensive use of collage in 1949; scraps of newspaper being objects in themselves helped to affirm that the picture too was an object in itself, rather than a representation of something else. The collage also had the function of emphasising the picture surface, something which most artists before the war had tried to disguise through the use of artistic devices like perspective and shading. The abstract painters of the 1950s onwards went on to explore the flat surface of their canvases in a variety of ways.