Victor Pasmore

Victor Pasmore had to fight for a painting career

Victor Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey, on 3 December 1908. His studies at Summer Field School in Oxford and Harrow School in London came to a premature end with the unexpectedly early death of his father, and from then on, Victor Pasmore thus had to earn his own living and reluctantly took a job in the London City Council. However, he did not give up art: He studied painting at the Central School of Art on the side and, alongside his fellow artists William Coldstream, Rodrigo Moynihan and Claude Rogers, founded the Euston Road School, which positioned itself against academic teaching. It only lasted, however, a few years. Victor Pasmore initially experimented with abstraction only briefly during this early phase and then turned to a lyrical, figurative style for a while, in which he depicted the Thames at Hammersmith in the manner of his fellow countryman William Turner and the American James McNeill Whistler.

The 1940s brought the step towards Abstraction

Victor Pasmore refused military service during the Second World War on conscientious grounds, but was conscripted and imprisoned after repeatedly refusing to obey orders. However, a court of appeal in Edinburgh granted him the exemption from conscription he wanted. In 1940, before the end of the war, Pasmore married the artist Wendy Blood, with whom he had two children, a son and a daughter. As a painter, he soon left the figurative paths of his early years which had been influenced by Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, even though these had brought him his first exhibition successes at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. Pasmore's interest in the writings of Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian finally led him to abstraction, and in 1947, inspired by the painter Ben Nicholson and his book Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art - published in collaboration with the sculptor Naum Gabo and the architect Leslie Martin - he developed a purely abstract style. The British art historian Herbert Read praised this as the greatest revolution in English art history of the post-war period.

International success in the 1950s and 1960s

In 1950, Victor Pasmore received a commission to design an abstract mural for a bus depot in Kingston upon Thames and, in the following year, also made a contribution to the Festival of Britain, which was committed to promoting Constructivism. Pasmore was also very committed beyond his own career to the acceptance of Constructivism: he supported his colleague Richard Hamilton and mediated a teaching position for him in Newcastle, and, in collaboration with Helen Phillips and Ernő Goldfinger, ensured that the exhibition This Is Tomorrow was given a Constructivist structure. As Consulting Director of Architectural Design for the Peterlee Development Corporation, he created a synthesis of architecture and art with his Apollo Pavilion, which met with some controversy and forced the artist to defend his work at a public meeting. Pasmore took part in Documenta II in Kassel in 1959, and represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1961 and at the São Paolo Biennale in 1965.

Victor Pasmore died in Valletta, Malta, on 23 January 1998.