Victor Pasmore Paintings and Graphics 1980 - 92

Born in 1908, Victor Pasmore belonged to the generation of artists who experienced and made the twentieth-century renaissance in the visual arts. His artistic roots were in naturalistic painting and in the heightened colours of the Fauvism, but in the 1930s he was one of the founders of London's Euston Road School, which associated patient realism with social progress. His work was meeting with critical praise and patronage when, at the end of the 1940s, he suddenly turned to abstract collage and painting and then to relief constructions made of rectangular elements of wood and plastic. He now appeared as the leader of a new Constructivist movement in Britain, a role that at first brought him more notoriety than admiration. Pasmore taught, published statements, made works of art for public places and contributed significantly as consultant designer to the character of Peterlee New Town in County Durham. That experience returned his attention to the limitless potential of painting. His later work, particularly after 1966 when he made Malta his principal home, took on an unexpected fullness of invention, colour and form. While most of it was still abstract, it embodied ideas and references to the visible world, contributing eloquently to the great tradition of poetic images of nature we associate with the late works of Turner, admired by Pasmore ever since he discovered them in boyhood. This book, produced in collaboration with the artist, presents his work of 1980 to 1992. It is a companion volume to the monograph and catalogue published in 1980, covering the years 1926–79. It contains a new statement by the artist and an essay by Norbert Lynton on Pasmore's work, in particular on later developments in it, together with a new chronological summary of the artist's life.

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Authors Biography

Norbert Lynton, who died in 2007, was the founding professor of art history at Sussex University and a respected critic. His books include The Story of Modern Art, the Yale Dictionary of Art and studies of Quentin Bell, Paul Klee, Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore and Jack Smith.

Artists Biography

(b Chelsham, Surrey, 3 Dec 1908; d Gudja, Malta, 23 Jan 1998). English painter and printmaker. He developed an interest in painting as a schoolboy at Harrow, but the early death of his father prevented him from carrying on his studies at this stage. From 1927 to 1937 he worked as a clerk at the Head Office of the London County Council, painting in his spare time and paying frequent visits to the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery; he became a member of the London Artists’ Association in 1932 and of the London Group in 1934. His early paintings, such as The Window (1933; London, Dept Environment), were reminiscent of Matisse and the Fauvists in their free handling and their subject-matter of still-life and views through open windows, though he also took part in the Objective Abstractions exhibition (1934; London, Zwemmer Gal.), at which Geoffrey Tibble (1909–52), Rodrigo Moynihan, Graham Bell and others displayed fully abstract work. Pasmore himself made a number of abstract pictures shortly after this exhibition but later decided to destroy them.

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