Footnotes

Provenance
With Marlborough Fine Art, London, 4 June 1964, where acquired by the previous owner
Private Collection, U.K.

'I have to bring the square to life, to give it another dimension, within the limitations of its own linear rectangularity. Whatever division you give it or whatever movement you superimpose, it still retains and remains the square. You must come to terms with that.' (Victor Pasmore, 1964)

Blue Development No.2 was painted in 1964, the same year Victor Pasmore was awarded the Carnegie Prize for painting at Pittsburgh International with Pierre Soulages. By now he was a well-established and respected abstract artist, able to make a living from his work, having left teaching at the University of Durham behind him in 1961 following a contract with Marlborough Fine Art the same year.

He had spent the 1950s and early 1960s making painted relief constructions, but as the decade progressed and his exhibitions at Marlborough proved, it was easier to sell his two-dimensional work. In 1965 he was afforded a major retrospective at the Tate and the following year he purchased a house on Malta with his wife, where he developed his fascination with the colour blue.

In Blue Development No.2 we see Pasmore's characteristic use of the solid black line, used here as a horizontal towards the lower edge of the composition to support the field of blue above. This was a motif prevalent in Pasmore's work during the early 1960s and was quite probably influenced by a significant visit he made to Joan Miro in Majorca where the Spanish Master impressed the importance of line on him. With his constructions now taking lesser prominence Pasmore turned to painting again. In this beautifully simple design he has laid down a thin mosaic of vertical dabs onto the neutrally coloured board, over which a thin horizontal wash of blue has been applied to create a translucent effect, similar to that experienced when viewing water from above.

Alastair Grieve has recently reminded us of the significance and enjoyment which Pasmore re-discovered with painting, the same year Blue Development No.2 was executed:

'In his landmark article in Studio International, June 1964, entitled "Victor Pasmore. The home-coming to paint", Charles Spencer recorded questioning the artist about his increased involvement in painting. Pasmore answered: "I now realise that I am a painter, and quite content to paint. I'm prepared to accept that my own bent and training is not as a sculptor or architect. I'm returning to paint because I find I can go further with it."' (Alastair Grieve, Victor Pasmore, Towards a New Reality, Lund Humphries, London, 2016, p.79).