Gordon Onslow Ford; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Last survivor of the Paris surrealists of the 1930s
20 November 2003
Gordon Onslow Ford, painter: born Wendover, Buckinghamshire 26
December 1912; married 1941 Jacqueline Johnson (died 1978); died Inverness,
California 8 November 2003.
Gordon Onslow Ford was the last surviving member of the Paris surrealist
group of the 1930s. Although less well-documented than the work of his
surrealist contemporaries, Onslow Ford's painting, writing and teaching has
had an understated impact on art from his days as a surrealist to the
present.
To a certain degree the artist himself played some part in his relatively
low profile, refusing to sell his works on the art market and selectively
donating them, most recently to the Lucid Art Foundation, in Inverness,
California, an organisation he helped establish in 1998 to support artists
and researchers committed to the natural environment and to the exploration
of deep levels of consciousness. His work has featured prominently in
exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and resides in the permanent
collections of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Tate.
Gordon Onslow Ford was born in 1912 in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, into an
artistic family. His grandfather, Edward Onslow Ford, was a leading figure
in the New Sculpture movement of the late 19th century. Although he painted
from a young age, Gordon Onslow Ford was discouraged by his guardians from
following an artistic career and was sent to the Dragon School in Oxford,
and later to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.
His service in the Royal Navy, 1927-37, did not dampen his strong desire to
take up a career in painting, and on leaving the Navy he moved to Paris and
entered into an unsatisfactory series of apprenticeships with the painters
André Lhote and Fernand Léger. It was in Paris that he made his first vital
acquaintance, meeting the young Chilean Roberto Matta Echaurren, who was
working in the architectural office of Le Corbusier. While Matta introduced
Onslow Ford to André Breton and the Paris surrealists in 1938, Onslow Ford
encouraged Matta to make the transition from drawing to painting, providing
him with studio space, and financially supporting the young Chilean by
purchasing a painting every month. It was also through discussions with
Onslow Ford that Matta developed the notion of "psychological morphology",
an idea that expressed both artists' interest in painting the invisible
forms taking shape in the depths of the psyche.
By 1939, Onslow Ford had become a regular at the surrealist meetings at the
Café Deux Magots, and had forged strong links with Yves Tanguy and the other
newly initiated surrealist painters, Victor Brauner, Esteban Frances and
Wolfgang Paalen. It was this group of young surrealists that Breton in 1939
proclaimed as the future of surrealist painting, defining it in terms of a
marked return to the techniques of psychic automatism from which surrealism
had evolved in the 1920s. The optimism with which Breton heralded this new
group owes much to the vitality and commitment of the younger members, of
whom Onslow Ford was pivotal. It was he who organised the summer sojourn in
Chémillieu in 1939, which was crucial in reinvigorating the group in the
foreboding final summer before the Second World War.
In late 1939, Onslow Ford was recalled to London as a Naval reserve and, as
rumour has it, was forced by a fortuitous malady to miss the Atlantic voyage
to which he had been assigned, thus escaping death on the first British ship
of the war to be sunk. Following his move to London, he transferred his
knowledge and experience of surrealism to the activities of the British
surrealist group. In June 1940 he participated in the important "Surrealism
Today" show at the Zwemmer Gallery, also providing the all-important
financial backing for the issue of the London Bulletin which accompanied the
exhibition, and co-editing the review with the Belgian surrealist and leader
of the British group E.L.T. Mesens.
Onslow Ford was finally relieved from active service with the help of the
artist Kay Sage, who had organised the Society for the Preservation of
European Culture in New York. In return for the society's intervention, Sage
arranged for Onslow Ford to give a series of lectures on surrealist
painting. In January-February 1941, Onslow Ford gave four lectures, entitled
"Surrealist Painting: an adventure into Human Consciousness", which were
attended by various young artists who would shortly become crucial figures
within the Abstract Expressionist movement, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko.
As the only English speaker of the exiled surrealist group, Onslow Ford
became an unwitting spokesman for the movement. His lectures on automatism
in particular were met with great interest by the budding New York group,
already receptive to experimentation with automatism and to Onslow Ford's
interest in Jungian analytical psychology. Onslow Ford has been recognised
as a precursor to Pollock in his development in the late 1930s of a
technique of pouring paint directly onto the canvas, which he termed
coulage.
In 1941 Onslow Ford married the writer and poet Jacqueline Johnson, and the
couple travelled to Mexico, settling for six years in Erongarícuaro, a
village in the Michoacán region, home to the Tarascan Indians. Although
Onslow Ford exhibited in the "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition in New
York, 1942, it was during the first two years in Mexico that he began to
distance himself from surrealism, breaking away in May 1943 although
retaining good relations with Breton.
In Mexico, Onslow Ford began to develop his painting away from its
surrealist roots towards an immersion within the natural world, a move that
was in some way prompted by his fears that becoming a social figure within
the New York art scene would ultimately be detrimental to his artistic
evolution. On his return from Mexico in 1947, he settled in the San
Francisco Bay area and in 1951 formed the group Dynaton, derived from the
Greek word for "the possible", with the artists Lee Mullican and the ex-
surrealist Wolfgang Paalen.
From this point onwards, Onslow Ford began to develop the metaphysical
element of his work that had been latent in his surrealist period, and began
to rearticulate his interest in exploring psychological depths through a
language, both written and visual, inspired by Buddhist philosophy and
spiritual practice. An interest in Eastern thought was becoming part of the
cultural climate of California at that time, as reflected in the
establishment of the Asian Academy (later renamed the California Institute
of Integral Studies) in San Francisco in 1951, where Onslow Ford studied the
non-dualistic Hindu philosophy of the Vedanta.
His works of the 1950s have strong echoes of the Theosophy- inspired early
abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka. Further study of
Buddhism and initiation into Chinese and Japanese calligraphy with a Zen
Master, Hodo Tobase Roshi, had an enormous impact on Onslow Ford's art and
his way of life. In 1952 he became an American citizen, and in 1958 he built
a home and studio in the secluded woodlands of the Bishop Pine Preserve
above Inverness.
It was in these woods, he recalled, that the revelation came to him in 1951
that the basic forms of the line, circle and dot were "at the root of art".
The discovery of this basic visual language, which dominated his art for
almost two decades, enabled the artist to work with the speed he deemed
necessary for capturing the flux of the "inner worlds which lie beyond
dreams". Constantly seeking greater technical mastery of his art, Onslow
Ford worked with the chemist William Parle in the early 1960s to create a
pioneering paint product that was a precursor to acrylics, and which
facilitated the rapid over- laying of black and white colours propitious to
the artist's experimentation with spontaneous gesture.
A highly articulate and poetic writer, Onslow Ford also communicated his
vision of art in several books, including Painting in the Instant (1964),
Creation (1978) and Once Upon a Time (1999). These writings map the
development of his painting along the axis of the notions of "Spontaneous
Expression" and "the Inner Worlds", which he defined as the creative life
force inherent within all forms of matter, becoming apparent only beyond the
boundaries of rational thought, and revealed through artistic vision.
Although such notions developed through his metaphysical concerns, they none
the less recall the surrealist origins of his thought, with the union of the
external and the internal, mind and matter, and the automatic gesture at
their heart.
Onslow Ford has left the majority of his work and his impressive collection
to the Lucid Art Foundation.
Donna Roberts