Victor Pasmore
One of Britain's best figurative painters, who abandoned it completely in 1948.
Victor Pasmore was born in Surrey in 1908, worked as a local government clerk for a decade, and painted the Thames at Chiswick and Hammersmith in a lyrical post-Impressionist manner that made him, by the 1940s, among the most admired figurative painters in Britain. Then he stopped. From 1948 he worked entirely abstractly — spirals, then constructed reliefs in painted wood and Perspex — a change Herbert Read called the most revolutionary event in post-war British art. He shaped the town of Peterlee as consulting director of urban design and built the Apollo Pavilion there. He died in Malta in 1998.
The two halves of the career are separate markets and the early Thames pictures are scarce and much sought. The constructed reliefs are the historically significant work and are physically vulnerable: painted wood and Perspex, shallow, easily chipped and warped, with discoloured Perspex a common and irreversible problem. The later spiral and organic paintings and the large printed output of screenprints and etchings are plentiful and accessible. Works are usually signed and dated on the reverse; the Tate and the artist's estate hold the reference material.
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