his exhibition offers a snapshot of three stages of Victor Pasmore's career between 1940 and 1965, when his work evolved from two-dimensional figurative paintings to three-dimensional reliefs.

Bringing together fifteen works from the Arts Council Collection, as well as three loans from the British Council Collection this exhibition features the work of one of the most important British artists of the post-war period.  

Charting Victor Pasmore's career as it evolved from early figurative paintings to abstraction, this exhibition reveals the sensitivity to form, balance and shape that runs through his work. Included is one of the Arts Council Collection’s most significant paintings – ‘The Snowstorm:  Spiral Motif in Black and White’, 1950-51. 

Over the course his long career, Pasmore’s art changed direction several times, moving from atmospheric views of the Thames in the 1940s to wholly abstract works in the 1950s and 60s. Early on he was associated with the Euston Road School and its search for an objective recording of visual reality. After a dramatic conversion to abstraction in 1948, he produced some of the most radically uncompromising paintings and reliefs of the period - a move which renowned critic Herbert Read described as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’.

Pasmore taught in the Fine Art Department in Newcastle between 1954-61 and alongside Richard Hamilton helped develop the ‘Basic Design’ revolution in art education.

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Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.