(1907- 1995)

Victor Reinganum was an illustrator and painter, who, throughout his long career, worked on many issues of the Radio Times and illustrated numerous books. Gravitating between abstraction and surrealism, Reiganum's paintings communicate a sense of satire and irony through eccentric fusions of architectural and animal forms. Deep undertones of dark metaphors can be deciphered from the behaviour of the paintings' menacing inhabitants.

Victor was born in London on 13th September 1907. He was educated at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, described in The Year's Art (1929) as `...a school for serious work run on absolutely modern lines., .there are no formalities and students can join at any time.. .the only qualification necessary being the desire to study seriously.' From 1924, his studies continued at the Academie Julian in Paris, where Leger accepted him as one of his six private students. After returning to London in 1926, one of the offices he visited with his portfolio of drawings was that of the Radio Times. There, the art editor bought a drawing on the spot and starting Reinganum on his freelance career as an illustrator.

In due course, he became responsible, together with Eric Fraser, for the visual style of the Radio Times during the 1930s and 1940s. The discipline this kind of work demanded, the speed and accuracy with which he had to absorb information and interpret it, informed his painting and graphic design. Reinganum's work at the Radio Times continued for forty years.

In the same year of commencing his employment there, Reinganum, together with cartoonist Nicolas Bentley and two other friends from the Heatherley School of Art, launched the Pandemonium Group — so called because of the dissimilar styles and ideas of the founding members. By 1929, after a brief flirtation with film set design, Reinganum had begun to experiment with abstraction.

His freelance work as a designer and illustrator included book jackets, theatre design, posters and advertisements. Like many of his contemporaries, he worked for Shell and London transport, two main patrons of progressive artists in the 1920s and 1930s. His clients also included BBC Television, Ministry of Works, Post Office and British Rail.

In the 1950s, Reinganum designed three works for the Science Museum Electric Power Collection: In 1954 a panel to be engraved in plate glass, and in 1957 two large ornamental grilles in anodised aluminium, one depicting impulse testing and the other atomic power.

The 1960s saw Reiganum's status as a painter proliferate further due to his partaking in Bond Street's Marlborough Art Gallery exhibition, Art in Britain - 1930-1940. There, Reinganum's paintings hung alongside such names as Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth,

Tristram Hillier, Piet Mondrian and Henry Moore. During the same decade, he lectured at Croydon College of Art in the Department of Graphic Design and Printing.

In 1984, the Tate Gallery bought one of Reinganum's works, `Diagram', made in 1939. In a letter written by Reinganum to the Tate, he states, "l have indulged in abstract painting on and off since the early 30s, interspersed with my more usual semi-abstract or slightly surrealist work. My rather tight and carefully thought-out manner I suppose derives from the strict discipline of illustration, i.e. the filling of a given space by the most effective arrangement of forms... I chose the word `diagram' because I thought ‘abstract’ rather unsuitable to describe work not abstracted from anything.” He continued to paint ‘Diagrams’ for years to come.

After moving away from London, he lived firstly in Hartfield, Sussex before moving to Tunbridge Wells in the early 1980s.