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Victor Pasmore

Born 1908, Surrey.  Died 1998.

Edwin John Pasmore is better known as Victor Pasmore.  In 1927 he started work in the Health Department of London County Council, attending evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1932 he joined the London Artists' Association, met William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, and was elected to the London Group two years later.

In 1937 with financial help from Kenneth Clark, he gave up his clerical job and with William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, founded what became known as the Euston Road School whose painters concentrated on evocative studies of London suburbs and daily life.

Pasmore taught at Camberwell School of Art from 1943-49 where he inspired Terry Frost, and then became visiting professor at Central School of Art and Design until 1953. From 1954 to 1961 he was director of painting at the Department of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle where with Richard Hamilton and Terry Frost, he devised an undergraduate fine art course that became the model for art schools across the country.  From 1954-77 Pasmore was the consulting director of urban design at Peterlee New Town.

In 1948 he turned to pure abstraction, the first of his generation to do so, in an attempt to create an art no longer dependent on nature. Nevertheless his abstract calligraphic style, so oriental in feeling, and developed in the Points of Contact series in the Warwick collection, is based on rock formations at St Ives. He contributed to This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. In 1960 he was selected for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

He had retrospective exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in 1965 and in 1980. In 2001 Tate Liverpool mounted an exhibition of his work that toured to the Mead Gallery. Pasmore was made a Companion of Honour in 1981, was elected to the Royal Academy in 1984 and was given an honorary degree by the University of Warwick in 1990.

Points of Contact No.1
Points of Contact No.5
Points of Contact No.4
Points of Contact No.17 (What is the Object Over There)