@eduardmsmr
Happy Surrealist Saturday!!
This week’s exploration brought me to someone whose name I randomly found while literally exploring more surrealism at large, but it didn’t take me a lot to realize his impact on the movement.
His name is Gordon Onslow Ford.
He was born on December 26, 1912, in Wendover, England, and he became the youngest member ever admitted to André Breton’s (founder of the Surrealist movement) Paris circle.
By the time of his death in 2003 at the age of 90, he was one of the very last survivors of the heroic age of Surrealism, and one of the most underappreciated bridges between European Surrealism and American modern art.
His grandfather, Edward Onslow Ford (Victorian sculptor), was a prominent figure in British art. Gordon began painting landscapes at 11 under his uncle’s guidance.
But after his father died when Gordon was just 14, the family sent him to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth instead of art school.
He became a naval officer and the ocean had a deep impact on him, as seen in his early paintings, which were full of sea and sky.
But while stationed with the Navy, Gordon kept visiting Paris. In 1937, at 24, he resigned his commission and moved to Paris full-time to paint.
He studied briefly with André Lhote (French Cubist painter and teacher) and Fernand Léger (French painter and pioneer of modern art), but what truly changed his direction was meeting a young Chilean architect named Roberto Matta (Chilean-French Surrealist painter).
Matta was working in Le Corbusier’s (Swiss-French architect) studio and making extraordinary small drawings on the side.
Gordon recognized something electric in them and encouraged Matta to leave architecture for painting which was a nudge that helped alter the course of 20th-century art.
The two became inseparable, painting together in Brittany in the summer of 1938, refining their automatic techniques and reading P.D. Ouspensky’s (Russian esoteric philosopher) Tertium Organum, a book about higher dimensions that reshaped both their philosophies of art.
In 1938, André Breton invited both Gordon and Matta to join the Surrealist group and attend their legendary meetings at the Café des Deux Magots.
Gordon was suddenly at the center of the movement, befriending Pierre Mabille (French writer and anthropologist), Yves Tanguy (French Surrealist painter of dreamlike seascapes), Max Ernst (German Surrealist painter and sculptor), Wolfgang Paalen (Austrian-Mexican Surrealist painter and theorist), and Victor Brauner (Romanian Surrealist painter).
He shared a studio with Brauner and, in a beautiful twist of creative anxiety, found himself too intimidated to paint in front of his friend.
So he began pouring Ripolin enamel paint directly onto the canvas and peeling off layers to create depth. He called this technique “coulage,” from the French word for “to flow.”
It was a method of spontaneous, automatic painting that, in retrospect, echoes some of the poured, gestural strategies Jackson Pollock (American Abstract Expressionist painter) would become world-famous for a few years later.
In the summer of 1939, Gordon rented a château at Chemilleu in the French Alps and invited his friends to spend the months painting, reading poetry, and exchanging ideas.
Among the guests were André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba (French Surrealist painter and Breton’s wife), Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Esteban Francés (Spanish Surrealist painter), and Kay Sage (American Surrealist painter and poet). Their neighbor, Gertrude Stein (American writer and art collector), visited regularly.
When WWII broke out, the Society for the Preservation of European Culture helped bring Gordon to New York. Because he was one of the very few Surrealists who spoke fluent English, he was asked to deliver a series of lectures at the New School for Social Research in early 1941, titled “Surrealist Painting: An Adventure Into Human Consciousness.”
He also helped organize four significant Surrealist exhibitions that year. The lectures drew young artists who would soon transform American art:
Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell (American Abstract Expressionist painter), Arshile Gorky (Armenian-American painter), William Baziotes (American Abstract Expressionist), and David Hare (American sculptor), among others.
Robert Motherwell later emphasized how much the Surrealist state of mind shaped the young American painters of that era, and Gordon was one of the key figures transmitting it.
At those lectures, Gordon met American writer Jacqueline Johnson. They married in 1941 and moved to Mexico, settling in ErongarĂcuaro, a remote PurĂ©pecha village on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro. They lived there for 6 years, absorbing the indigenous rhythms of the land.
Gordon’s paintings shifted from astral biomorphic forms toward luminous, map-like compositions featuring islands, pyramids, and volcanoes. Their home became a gathering place for exiled Surrealists:
Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo (Spanish-Mexican Surrealist painter), Alice Rahon (French-Mexican Surrealist painter and poet), Benjamin PĂ©ret (French Surrealist poet), and CĂ©sar Moro (Peruvian Surrealist poet).
Gordon and Jacqueline also contributed to Paalen’s journal “DYN”, which was pushing Surrealism toward new intellectual frontiers.
In 1947, they moved to San Francisco. Gordon had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1948 titled “Towards a New Subject in Painting,” signaling his departure from orthodox Surrealism.
He then co-founded the Dynaton group in 1951 with Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican (American painter associated with Abstract Expressionism), exhibiting together at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
The name came from the Greek word for “the possible,” and the group described their artworks as objects for meditation, which was a radical idea at the time.
Gordon and Jean Varda (Greek-French collage artist and bohemian) acquired a decommissioned ferryboat, the S.S. Vallejo, which they docked in Sausalito and converted into studios.
For years, the Vallejo became a floating salon which Roberto Matta visited, along with writers Henry Miller (American novelist) and Alan Watts (British-American philosopher of Eastern thought), and Japanese calligrapher Hodo Tobase.
Gordon studied Zen calligraphy with Tobase for about five years, and this immersion in Asian thought transformed his painting.
Buddhist teachings of the Void, the practice of the brushstroke, and the philosophy of emptiness led him to a revelation that would define the rest of his career.
In the early 1950s, during a walk overlooking the Pacific Ocean, he later said he saw that the root of all painting was made up of three elemental forms: line, circle, and dot. He believed these were the building blocks of the universe itself.
In 1957, Gordon and Jacqueline acquired virgin woodlands in the hills of Inverness, California, near Point Reyes. They later donated the majority of the land to the Nature Conservancy.
He built his home and studio in the forest and began writing, publishing “Painting in the Instant” in 1964 and “Creation”in 1978.
When Jacqueline died in 1976, Gordon retreated deeper into solitude and painting. But in 1989, he met Fariba Bogzaran (Iranian-American artist and lucid dream researcher), who found extraordinary connections between his paintings, lucid dreaming, and meditative states of consciousness.
Together with Robert Anthoine, they cofounded the Lucid Art Foundation in 1998, dedicated to exploring the relationship between art, consciousness, and nature.
Gordon’s paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Britain, the de Young Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In recent years, his work has continued to surface in major museum and gallery exhibitions devoted to Surrealism, abstraction, and the postwar avant-garde.
The Lucid Art Foundation continues to steward his archive and host artist seminars in Inverness.
Thank you for reading!!🌹
3 replies
2 recasts
8 reactions