Victor Pasmore (1908 - 1998)

I have just taken delivery of Norbert Lynton's 1992 monograph on Victor Pasmore, and a lovely book it is too. Pasmore was largely self taught, having to spend ten years working for the London county council (as it was then), refusing promotion so he could dedicate enough time to painting. Pasmore's plunge into abstraction in the late forties and early fifties was described by Herbert Read as the most revolutionary event in post-war British art (bearing in mind that the war had only finished 5 years before, this was probably not as big a claim as it now sounds).
There is a beautiful balance to all Pasmore's abstract work; space, movement, tension and colour all effortlessly balanced. As William Packer puts it in his Financial Times obituary: "vaguely organic forms held in check and judicious tension by more stable elements - as it were, water flowing round a rock, a crowd through a railway station".
Pasmore's legacy is not an easy one, and his role as "consultant director of urban design" in the development of Peterlee gave him the opportunity to turn his constructivist theories into a concrete reality with The Pavilion (known locally as "the Pivvy"). Now seen by many as part of the Brutalist legacy, The Pavilion, although still standing, has been knocked about in an attempt to make it less vandal friendly. Turned down for Grade II listing in 1998, it languishes as a monument to more optimistic times. Pasmore himself decided to move to a nice old house in Malta, where he continued to paint until his death in 1998, aged 89.