Gordon Onslow Ford, NY Sun obit
Hyfler/Rosner
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
Gordon Onslow Ford, who died November 8 at his home in California at age
90, was quite literally the last of the group of Surrealist painters and
writers who surrounded the poet André Breton, having joined the movement in
1938 when he was living in Paris.
In New York City during World War II, he helped to organize exhibitions
of Surrealist art and gave a series of lectures at the New School for Social
Research that introduced the movement to a new generation of American
artists, including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
He devoted his artistic life to the Surrealist project of revealing the
mysteries of the unconscious, although his formal identification with the
movement more or less came to an end within a few years.
His own painting moved from a recognizable version of Surrealism
influenced in part by his idol, Yves Tanguy, to a more abstract form of
action painting, which he boiled down to three primary figures: dot, line,
and circle. He painted quickly, in order to be in more direct contact with
his inner life force. "It's all done in the air," he told the Los Angeles
Times in 1990. "The canvas isn't touched at all."
In part because he had independent means and did not need to sell much
work - and also because he lived in the California mountains, outside of
urban art circles - his name is not as wellknown as those of other
Surrealists.Yet he knew the important artists of pre-World War II France and
amassed a terrific collection of their work.
Onslow Ford was born in England on December 26,1912,the grandson of
Edward Onslow Ford, a famous Victorian sculptor who was a favorite of the
Queen.His father was a doctor who had apparently had his spirit broken by
what he had seen in action at the World War I battle of Gallipoli. He died
early, and this heritage may have left Onslow Ford with a distaste for
combat.
His guardians sent him to the Royal Naval College, and he became a
commissioned officer. He was later to recall with great pleasure the
experience of navigating by stars under clear skies in the Mediterranean. It
is probably no coincidence that many of his later paintings are deeply
incised fields of crosses, lines, and curlicues resembling the night sky.
The inner space he strove to portray contained outer space within it.
In 1937, he took the highly unusual step of resigning his commission and
moved to Paris, intent on becoming an artist.Although he knew nobody there,
within a year he had made a lifelong friend in Roberto Matta Echaurren, a
Chilean artist who was working in the studio of Le Corbusier.The two
ingratiated themselves with André Breton, who in the pages of the Surrealist
journal "Minotaure" soon proclaimed them to be the future of Surrealism.
Onslow Ford was later to claim that "Matta and I were the first painters
to appreciate the importance of Tanguy," whom the other Surrealists seemed
to regard as "a curiosity, an eccentric," perhaps on account of Tanguy's
prodigious consumption of alcohol. For Onslow Ford,Tanguy seemed to
represent an irrepressible creative force. On their first meeting, he
wrote,Tanguy had just sold a painting to the American collector Peggy
Guggenheim. "At the Deux Magots [the regular Surrealist hangout] he wrote
checks for each of his needy friends, then took a taxi to the south of
France. His small fortune lasted but a few weeks."
He wrote of being at the Café de Flore once when Picasso turned to Tanguy
's wife, Jeanette, and said, "It's easy to make a Tanguy."He drew a quick
sketch, at which Jeanette, "naturally furious, picked up a chair and hit,
not Picasso, but Dora Maar. (That taught Picasso a lesson he was incapable
of learning.)"
Boom times continued through the summer of 1939, when Onslow Ford rented
a chateau at Chémillieu, near the Swiss border. Gertrude Stein, who
recommended the place and lived nearby, became a frequent visitor. Breton,
Tanguy, Matta, and a number of other Surrealists spent the summer creating
art and poetry. In the evenings they would play cards with poems and
drawings as the stakes. Germany's invasion of Poland put a temporary stop to
the artistic reveries.The group decided that even with Hitler on the verge
of invading France,"It would be of more importance to go on with our
creative activities than it would be to participate in the hostilities."
Onslow Ford, still in the naval reserves, was recalled to active duty but
fortuitously came down with appendicitis and missed his ship, which became
the first of the war to be sunk by a U-boat, all hands lost. He was granted
leave and sent to America as an emissary of European culture at the
invitation of the Society for the Preservation of European Culture. Tanguy,
Breton, Matta, and others had come to New York with the outbreak of war. As
the only native English-speaking Surrealist, he became something of a
spokesman for the movement.
In January and February of 1941, he gave a series of lectures at the New
School entitled "Surrealist Painting: An Adventure into Human
Consciousness." He told the audience that artists need to "tear down the
veils one by one that hide the reality of our own incomprehensible
universe." Recalling the lectures many years later, he wrote: "Yves Tanguy
was present at the lecture that I gave on his painting. He did not
understand a word but, I was told, he wept." Particularly bracing for young
artists on hand, such as Pollock, was his stress on automatism and the
notion of pouring paint directly onto canvas, a technique he called
"coulage." Beside helping to cement his reputation as an artist, the
lectures served as an introduction to his wife, Jacqueline Johnson.
He also helped to organize the famous "First Papers of Surrealism"
exhibition of 1942, although by the time it appeared he had already decamped
for Mexico, where he was to live until 1947.
In Mexico he painted in a small Tarascan village, and eventually severed
his official relations with the Surrealist movement, although he remained
friendly with Breton, Tanguy, and Matta. Returning to America, he had his
first one-man show, at the Karl Nierendorf Gallery in New York.
He settled in San Francisco and purchased an old ferryboat that he
converted into a studio that became a gathering place for local artists.
Together with several other artists, he formed the "Dynaton" movement,
dedicated to the "quest for inner worlds." Increasingly, he was drawn to
Eastern spirituality. He studied Buddhism with Alan Watts, as well as
Hinduism and Chinese calligraphy. He came to regard the act of painting as a
form of spiritual expression.
In 1957, he purchased several hundred acres of virgin forest in
Inverness, Calif., where he built a home and studio. He published books on
his artistic philosophy, with titles like "Painting in the Instant" and
"Creation."
In the early 1960s, he worked with a chemist to create fast-drying paints
in vivid colors, precursors to what would be acrylics. These helped him
realize his goal of having his painting become the record of an instant. He
also kept a pad next to his bedside table, and would force himself to sketch
while only half-awake. In recent years he was the subject of retrospectives
in America, Germany, Chile, and Spain. His art hangs in many major museums
in America and abroad.