ART: PRIVATE VIEW

Victor Pasmore Marlborough Fine Art, London W1

Victor Pasmore, who died last year aged 90, is being well served this summer. In London, Marlborough Fine Art has a painting retrospective and a show of his post-1990 printmaking, while the Tate Gallery in Liverpool has devoted an exhibition to his work which runs until March 2000.

It is good to see Pasmore getting this kind of recognition as he's an important figure in the middle years of 20th century British art, if sometimes a rather hard one to place. He's sometimes described as two painters rather than one: pre- and post-1948, the year in which he turned to abstraction. But if these exhibitions prove anything it is that there was some kind of continuity running right the way through. The best pictures are those that immediately pre-date the move towards formal abstraction - especially a series of abbreviated landscapes which concentrate on trees painted with a hint of Klimt and a dash of pointillism. In old age he returned to a kind of figuration, painting the sea and sky in a Turneresque vortex of swirls that seems akin to his spiral paintings of the 1950s, but with little people or boats squeezed in between the lines.

Victor Pasmore, Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, London W1 (0171-629 5161)

to 30 July

Richard Ingleby