If Picasso had been born in Surrey…

When Victor Pasmore abandoned nudes and landscapes for abstract squiggles, he changed the course of British art, says Mark Hudson

Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a beaten-down artistic backwater. Over in New York, the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and Rothko may have been in full flow, but few people in London were even aware of it. During the war, British art had turned in on itself, looking back to the history and culture that had almost been lost. Even great, pre-war modernists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were abandoning abstraction and returning to landscapes.

At that time, Victor Pasmore, 39, was one of Britain’s most admired figurative painters: his post-impressionistic scenes of the Thames at Hammersmith remain some of the most lyrical and evocative British paintings of the 20th century. More than that, he was seen as an exemplar of absolute integrity whose every brush mark was thought out rigorously. So it was all the more of a betrayal to the old guard when, in 1948, he suddenly went over to the “other side”, producing paintings composed entirely of circles, squares, triangles and spirals.

Almost two decades before Bob Dylan “went electric” – and incurred the wrath of his folkdevoted fans – Pasmore’s shift to abstraction had an even more divisive impact on the cultural life of his era. As Britain’s leading art critic, Herbert Read, put it, Pasmore’s Damascene conversion was “the most revolutionary event in post-war British art”.

A new exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham looking at the fascinating, but largely forgotten figure, of Pasmore, centres on the moment of his shift from figuration to abstraction. It provides an opportunity to ask why a much-loved painter with the support of the British cultural establishment should have risked everything to create art for which, at that time, there was almost no audience. How did this unlikely figure come to open the floodgates to all the wonderful, appalling and downright ludicrous developments we’ve seen since?

The large Victorian house where Pasmore lived and worked from 1947 until his death in 1998 still stands, little changed since, in Blackheath, south-east London. His son John lives on the upper storeys, but the ground floor feels frozen mid-20th century: the artist’s books and records, slightly battered modernist furniture, paintings and constructions fill the space.

“Victor saw his studio as a kind of laboratory,” says John, gesturing along a corridor towards the rooms where his father once worked. “He was like a scientist, doing experiments to find out how things worked. Then you’d hear the typewriter going with this really agitated clatter, as he tried to get his ideas down while they were still in his mind.”

Ideas about what? The younger Pasmore looks at me dumbfounded. “Art! Occasionally you’d see him watching the Test match, but really with my dad it was all completely about art.”

Tall, with a bristly beard, Pasmore was an odd mixture of the brusque and the bashful, his English reserve offset by moments of furious excitement when his ideas were in full flow. Born in 1908, his background was highly conventional: the son of a surgeon, he was raised in the Surrey stockbroker belt and educated at Harrow. But following his father’s

Conversion: left, Victor Pasmore’s Green Landscape with Gate (1943); right, the artist working on The Snowstorm, only seven years later