La toilette

Although later becoming a renowned Constructivist and Abstract painter, Victor Pasmore's artistic career was dominated by figurativism in the 1940s. With four other English painters, Pasmore co-founded the Euston Road School in 1937, advocating the relevance and universalism of art through naturalism and realism and, despite the school closing in 1939 such principles influenced Pasmore's figurative career. His paintings in this style most commonly feature the English landscape or studies of one or more people, and space is often divided by horizontal rectangles or lines.

In the case of ‘La toilette’, an elegantly dressed woman is shown with brush in hand, in front of a background divided by flat brown colour and the creamy white of the bed she sits upon. Unlike Pasmore's ‘The Suffragettes’ 1943-44 (AGNSW collection), in which design and line provide movement in a painting of stalled figures, in ‘La toilette’ the simple division of the painting into horizontal halves creates a stillness which contrasts with the woman's fluid movement and energy.

Not only was Pasmore one the most exceptional figurative painters of the twentieth century, but his later exploration of Abstract art was described by art critic Herbert Read as "the most revolutionary event in post-war British art", and following this Pasmore became a pioneer of the Constructivist revival in Britain. (EF)