Footnotes

Provenance
Michael Spens, by whom gifted to
Private Collection
Their sale; Christie's, London, 8 June 2001, lot 158
With Jonathan Clark & Co, 14 September 2001, where purchased by
Ross D. Siragua Jr., from whom acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Tate Gallery, Victor Pasmore Retrospective Exhibition 1925-65, 14 May-27 June 1965, cat.no.223, pl.65 (as Relief and Transparent Construction in White and Black)
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Art, Victor Pasmore, July 1965, cat.no.55; this exhibition travelled to Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, August 1965
Calais, Musée des Beaux Arts et de la Dentelle de Calais, Victor Pasmore, 1950-1967, June-October 1985, cat.no.34
New York, Center for International Contemporary Arts, Victor Pasmore, Nature into Art, November 1990-February 1991, cat.no.12, pl.9

Literature
Alan Bowness and Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Constructions and Graphics 1926-1979, Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, p.117, cat.no.362 (ill.b&w.)

Abstract in White and Black (Version 1) was constructed in 1965 and included in Victor Pasmore's Tate Gallery retrospective of the same year. From the early 1950s the artist had made the decision to devote himself to constructed reliefs and they were a constant theme through the following decades. Unfortunately, a significant number of the early reliefs made from experimental materials such as wood, plastic and aluminium were destroyed. Pasmore was naturally aware of Ben Nicholson's celebrated painted reliefs (owning a small example himself) which were carved in shallow space and seemingly from slabs of solid board. However, Pasmore was intent on assembling his constructions from laths and sheets of machine-made, mass produced materials. In the present work, the artist has utilised perspex for example, a strong yet lightweight thermoplastic that is transparent and roots his work alongside current technological advances. This concept was largely indebted to the American abstract artist Charles Biederman who believed that the logical progression from Mondrian's reduction of nature to its simplest form was into the real space of the constructed relief.

In the present work, the square perspex frames a complex assembly of painted wood at varying positions and angles within a larger composition that is carefully balanced. The uniform black lines moving across the work is a 'development', which Pasmore in his own words described as an 'organic process' which 'suggests an element of movement and infinity' (Victor Pasmore quoted in Alastair Grieve, Victor Pasmore, Tate Publishing, London, 2010, p.108).