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.