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Although Victor Pasmore flirted with abstraction in the early 1930s, he destroyed his early paintings soon thereafter. In 1937, he joined William Coldstream and Claude Rogers in founding the short-lived Euston Road School, which favored naturalism and realism while eschewing avantgarde art movements such as surrealism and cubism. However, after seeing a Picasso-Matisse exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945, Pasmore made a dramatic shift in 1947–48 from figuration to abstraction, which the critic Herbert Read later described as “the most revolutionary event in post-war British art.” The years 1948 to 1954 were a period of great experimentation for Pasmore, as he produced abstract paintings and collages of basic geometric forms. In this example, Pasmore has pared his art down to the bare essentials of shapes and colors as a means of breaking with the illusionistic treatment of space in conventional easel painting, which he declared was dead.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016