Victor Pasmore

VICTOR PASMORE Chelsham, Surrey 1908 – 1998 Gudja, Malta Throughout his career Victor Pasmore earned an outstanding reputation as an artist, printmaker and architect. Born in Surrey in 1908, Pasmore was the son of a distinguished doctor. During his education at Harrow he was introduced to the works of the French Impressionists, but the death of his father prevented him from pursuing art as a career and on leaving school he went to work for the Public Health Department. He was, however, able to take evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Design where he met the director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark. In 1937, along with William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, Pasmore was one of the founders of the School of Drawing and Painting in Fitzroy Street which later moved to the Euston Road and became known as the Euston Road School which espoused a return to ‘objective nature’ and by 1938 Clark’s patronage enabled Pasmore to give up his job and become a full-time artist holding his first important one-man show at the Wildenstein Gallery in 1940. Early influences were predominately the Fauves and Cubists and in particular the work of Matisse and Picasso, but as his career developed he increasingly rejected the more traditional representation of nature that had preoccupied his earlier work and began to explore more abstract forms adopting a more scientific approach to his art. The discovery of Charles Biederman’s book ‘Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge’ encouraged a shift in his artistic perspective and he began to work more in relief, as well as developing an interest in architecture. In 1954 he was appointed Director of Painting at the University of Newcastle and began a major project redesigning the layout and architecture of Peterlee new town that was to last more than 20 years. Throughout the 1960’s Pasmore continued to work with abstraction creating masterful works constructed of amorphous shapes and controlled lines. He held a series of retrospective exhibitions in some of the most important international museums. In the introduction to a major exhibition of Pasmore’s work at the Tate Gallery in 1965, Ronald Alley, in assessing Pasmore’s work, wrote: ‘although Pasmore has covered a great deal of ground in his time, there are certain qualities which are common to all his work, such as lyricism, extreme refinement of taste, and a feeling for light and space. There is behind his work a restless, inquiring intelligence which is constantly probing in different directions but nevertheless, the work has an underlying unity.’ Victor Pasmore’s work is represented in a number of public collections including the British Council, London; Manchester City Art Gallery; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Tate Britain, London; and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.