Peter Schmidt

Peter Schmidt was born in 1931 in Berlin, Germany. He emigrated to England with his Jewish parents in 1938, fleeing Nazi persecution, and became a British citizen in 1945. He studied at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art, where he began developing a structured approach to painting, informed in part by Cézanne’s treatment of form and color. After receiving the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship, he spent a year in Sicily before returning to England, where he began teaching at Watford School of Art. In 1962 he established the Foundation Course at Watford, a one-year experimental program that emphasized systems thinking, self-directed inquiry, and interdisciplinary practice. He continued to teach the course throughout his career.

Schmidt’s work developed through systems, logic, and chance-based procedures, often in opposition to personal expression. He began what he called PROGRAM paintings in 1963, a body of work guided by predefined rules and shaped by musical structure. Later iterations introduced probabilistic methods to determine color and form, using fixed systems to produce outcomes that were not predetermined. This approach continued through the late 60s in his Cycloid series and later monoprints, which explored gradual variation, repetition, and algorithmic sequencing. His process combined programmed and non-programmed methods and drew on hallucinogenic experience, Buddhist philosophy, and topological drawing systems. In the 1970s, he collaborated with Brian Eno on a series of album covers and co-authored Oblique Strategies, a boxed set of prompt cards intended to break creative deadlock through chance-based decisions. In his later work, he returned to figuration through watercolor, producing portraits, landscapes, and layered compositions structured by underlying rules.

He acted as musical adviser to Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968, where he organized the sound section and curated its companion LP, one of the first anthologies of computer-generated music. His work was shown in solo exhibitions at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, and Paul Ide Gallery in Brussels. It is held in the collections of Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Council, and The Living Art Museum in Reykjavík. His final exhibition, More Than Nothing, opened ten days after his death. A retrospective, Remembered Images, was held at the Watford Museum in 1987.