John Kasmin is a British art dealer who along with Robert Fraser promoted British and American Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

 in the 1960s. He went to Magdalen College School in Oxford and then worked with the established London Art dealer Victor Musgrave

Victor Musgrave

Victor Musgrave was a British poet, art dealer and curator. Described by David Sylvester as a 'true pioneer' Musgrave was the first gallerist to show Bridget Riley and was a champion of Art Brut...

. In 1960 Kasmin met David Hockney

David Hockney

David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....

 and when he set up his own gallery in 1963 Hockney became one of his first artists. Other artists the Kasmin showed included: Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...

, Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt

Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...

, Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

, Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...

, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...

, Anthony Caro

Anthony Caro

Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...

, William G. Tucker

William G. Tucker

William G. Tucker is a modernist British sculptor and modern art scholar. He was born to English parents in Cairo, Egypt in 1935. In 1937, his family returned to England, where Tucker was raised. He attended the University of Oxford from 1955-1958...

, John Latham

John Latham (artist)

John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a British conceptual artist who lived for many years in England. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences...

, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen

Bernard Cohen

Bernard Leonard Cohen born June 14, 1924 in Pittsburgh, is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Cohen has been a staunch opponent to the so called Linear no-threshold model which postulates there exists no safe threshold for radiation exposure...

, Robin Denny, Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH, CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.-Early life:...

 and Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres, CBE is an English painter.-Early life and career:Ayres was born on 3 February 1930 in Barnes, London, the youngest of three sisters. Ayres started school when she was six. Her parents, a prosperous couple, sent her to Ibstock, a progressive school in Roehampton run on Fröbel...

.

Kasmin opened a large white space on New Bond Street that was unusual for the time - until then most commercial galleries had been domestic in scale. Kasmin closed his gallery in 1972 but continued to operate in partnership with other London dealers into the 1990s. Kasmin's son Paul is also an art dealer. He also has a son called Aaron who is an artist.

John Kasmin briefly lived in New Zealand in the mid 1950s, working temporarilly as an orderly at Wellington Public Hospital. Many young colonial bohemians of the day were entertained by his quick acerbic wit.