John Richard Passmore

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John Richard Passmore, 1954.

John Richard Passmore (* 4. February 1904 in Redfern , New South Wales ; † 9. October 1984 in Stanmore , New South Wales) was an Australian painter of abstract expressionism and art teacher .

life and work

John Richard Passmore was the son of the Guardian John Passmore and Queensland- born Elizabeth Webber. He left school at the age of 13 and initially worked as a paint mixer for a sign painter. In the early 1920s he was employed as a draftsman at the advertising agency Smith & Julius in Sydney , where he worked for Lever Bros Pty Ltd. carried out. Passmore studied at the Julian Ashton Art School , where he also taught lettering design until 1932. On December 19, 1925, he married Muriel Roscoe in the Methodist rectory in Marrickville ; from the union a son emerged. The couple separated in 1933 but never divorced. Passmore then moved to England .

In London he worked from 1933 to 1939 and again from 1947 to 1950 as a layouter at Lintas Pty Ltd (part of Unilever Ltd ). From 1934 Passmore attended evening classes with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art . He was regularly on the European mainland, where he dealt with the works of Rembrandt , Tintoretto , Cézanne and Picasso . Through his work at Lintas, he made close friends, in particular with the British painter Keith Vaughan and the art director Reg Jenkins, in whose small country house in Suffolk Passmore lived and painted in 1940. The following year he was drafted into the Royal Air Force for service in World War II.

Passmore returned to Australia in 1951 and taught at Julian Ashton's art school , where the painter John Olsen was one of his students. In 1954 he taught for eighteen months at Newcastle Technical College in Newcastle (New South Wales) . In 1956 he moved to the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College . He received the Helena Rubinstein travel grant in 1959 and traveled to Europe for twelve months.

His painting in the early 1950s was shaped by his humanistic phase, with the shoreline and coastline of Sydney and the people living there being recurring themes. Influenced by Cézanne, Passmore turned to Abstract Expressionism . Together with Ian Fairweather and Godfrey Miller , he is considered one of the three most important painters in Australia, who was highly regarded by his colleagues. In Sydney he exhibited regularly with the Society of Artists and the Sydney Group . In 1956 he took part in the Direction 1 exhibition, the participants of which are considered pioneers of Abstract Expressionism in Australian painting. Passmore is considered a pioneering figure in the post-war Australian art world. He looked after the younger generation of artists such as John Firth-Smith , Ann Thomson and Keith Looby ; among his students he had the reputation of a "guru". Believing that artists should paint and talk less, he said: "Painting comes first, then friendship".

After suffering a minor heart attack in the early 1960s, Passmore withdrew from the public eye. He resigned from his duties at East Sydney Technical College in 1962 and spent the last twenty years of his life as a hermit in Rushcutters Bay, a suburb in eastern Sydney. In his final weeks, Passmore was housed in a home for poor old men. After his death, he left his wife and son and was cremated. In his will of May 1984 he made Elinor Wrobel the sole trustee of the Passmore Trust , which received 270 of his paintings. According to Wrobel, she managed to convince Passmore not to burn his artwork before he died. Together with her husband Fred Wrobel, she opened a museum in the Merryfield Hotel by Woolloomooloo in 2003 , where they made Passmore's works available to the public. Their collection includes more than 1000 works of art from the 1840s to the present day.

The painter Adelaide Perry had portrayed Passmore around 1933, the work is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales . In 1985 the gallery organized a traveling exhibition with a retrospective of his work. With William Dobell , Russell Drysdale , Sidney Nolan , Ian Fairweather and Lloyd Rees, he was one of the twenty artists whose works were shown in the gallery's Australian Icons exhibition in 2000 . His work is part of the holdings of the National Gallery of Australia , all Australian state galleries and many regional galleries and university collections.

Works (selection)

  • Trees , 1945
  • Portrait of Marjorie Jenkins , 1946
  • Woman on Bed , 1955
  • Lindsay Tye, Suffolk , 1945
  • Summer , 1960
  • Burragorang Valley , 1932
  • Rose Landscape, Millers Point , 1952
  • Urban Landscape , 1963
  • Landscape with nude , 1940
  • Up the orchard , 1946
  • The Bathers , 1951
  • Boys looking for bait , 1954
  • Harbor view , 1952
  • Figures and trees , 1946
  • Boys by a waterhole , 1952

literature

  • Barry Pearce, Linda Slutxkin: John Passmore, 1904–1984: Retrospective December 19, 1984 - February 10, 1985. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1984.

Web links

Commons : John Richard Passmore  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Eileen Chanin: (1904–1984). In: Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 18, National Center of Biography, Australian National University , Canberra 2012.
  2. ↑ a b John Passmore. 1904-1984. In: National Portrait Gallery.
  3. ^ John Passmore Museum. In: dictionaryofsydney.org.
personal data
SURNAME Passmore, John Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian Abstract Expressionism painter and art teacher
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Redfern , New South Wales
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1984
Place of death Stanmore , New South Wales