György Gordon; painter (very good)
Hyfler/Rosner
György Gordon, artist and teacher: born Budapest 13 June
1924; Lecturer, Wakefield College of Art 1964-86; married
1945 Márta Ediger (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1961
Marianne Mózes (one son); died Wakefield, West Yorkshire 5
March 2005.
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp64843&rNo=0&role=art
The painter György Gordon was one of the many artists,
musicians and writers from central Europe who sought asylum
in England during the 20th century, and remained to enrich
British culture immeasurably.
He was born in Budapest in 1924, but, following the 1956
Hungarian uprising, came to live and work first in London,
and then, from 1964, in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Gordon's art,
which was honoured by a 70th birthday retrospective at the
National Portrait Gallery in 1995, explored not only
portraiture and self-portraiture, but still-life, landscape,
figure groups and a moving set of linocuts interpreting
Frigyes Karinthy's short story "The Circus". This story of a
boy who longed to perform his violin at the circus had
affected Gordon since his youth, and stands as his allegory
of the artist struggling to attain expression and
recognition.
Gordon's beginnings were reflected at his end, for his last
major work was a group portrait of the Lindsay Quartet in
performance, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery
in 2003.
The initial direction of his expression was determined
during the Second World War. While still a teenager, he
became a part-time ancillary ambulanceman in Budapest, where
he witnessed profoundly shocking events. His biographer
George Noszlopy recounts how Gordon's most persistent and
terrifying image was of a German army truck-driver who had
been crushed by his own vehicle, but was still alive when
carried to the ambulance. The memory of his flattened ribs
and exposed shoulder-blades re-emerged in the 1960s to form
the core of a series of visceral torso paintings, such as
Refugees (1964-65) and Crawling, Wounded Torso (1969).
Gordon's mother died, meanwhile, during the Hungarian
uprising, and her portrait on her deathbed is a savage
expression of disorientation and loss, painted in the depths
of anxiety and grief.
György Gordon, the son of a solicitor, received his first
art training before the war in private academies in
Budapest. In 1948 he won a place at the National Academy of
Fine Arts, where he was taught by the one-time avant-garde
artists János Kmetty, Jenö Barcsay and Robert Berény. Years
later, Gordon reflected:
While we have acquired the tricks of the trade, the
prevailing academic mentality got into our nervous systems,
and in my case, this delayed the process of my
self-realisation.
Gordon had married the cartoonist Márta Ediger ("Edma")
during the war, and to help support his wife and daughter
Anna, born during his studentship, he worked as a newspaper
illustrator and graphic designer, and for a monthly salary
supplied a stream of landscape and still-life paintings to
sell in Communist Party shops.
After the death of his mother and the crushing of the
uprising, Gordon felt that there was nothing left for him in
Hungary. Márta being in Australia covering the Melbourne
Olympics as a caricaturist, he and Anna left Hungary for
Salzburg, where they joined a plane-load of Hungarian
refugees seeking admission to the United States. When
interviewed by immigration, Gordon admitted that he had been
a member of the Communist Party, believing that the US
authorities would appreciate his frankness. They did. They
sent him to an internment camp, interrogated him, and put
him and Anna on a ship back to Europe, where he was
imprisoned for 30 days in Salzburg. Anna was sent to an
orphanage.
In this uncertain and frightening situation Gordon was duped
by a couple who vanished into Germany with Anna. Seeking
Márta, and frantic at Anna's disappearance, Gordon travelled
on his release from prison to London. There he rediscovered
his wife; but the marriage was over. With the help of the
police and the Red Cross, Gordon traced Anna in Germany,
where the child had been abandoned.
Such a painful crossing from the Communist to the free world
forged in György Gordon an attitude of calm reflection, and
a watchfulness that belied the sombre mood of his art. The
anger he needed to express found its way, entirely perhaps,
into his painting and drawing. In London, Gordon found work
as a graphic artist, and gradually discovered other émigré
Hungarian artists and intellectuals who were repositioning
their lives in Britain. Among these were the pianist Peter
Frankl, the psychologist Vera Förster and the actress and
art historian Erna Weiss. Among them too was the young
musician Marianne Mózes, who was training as a concert
pianist at the Royal Academy of Music. She and György were
married in 1961; their son, Adam, was born in 1963.
György and Marianne Gordon became naturalised British
subjects in 1964, the year György was appointed to the post
of Lecturer in Graphic Design at Wakefield Art College,
while Marianne gave piano lessons. The move from London to
the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire was the active
intervention that transformed Gordon's career. It soon
became clear that he was a natural teacher, being modest
enough to discover that teaching was a two-way process, and
that he could learn from his pupils.
Gordon now had to restrict his own painting to vacations,
while drawing at weekends. This generated periods of intense
productivity, in which he made groups of drawings and
paintings of faceless human figures with rounded, doll-like,
pallid bodies. His experience as a prisoner under
interrogation is an undercurrent in these works, but one
which he never acknowledged openly. Yet others, inspired by
Honoré Daumier and Chaim Soutine, allow Gordon's mastery of
creamy paint to suggest emotion and mood in a group of
imaginary portraits that typify his method of work - for all
his portraits, even the self-portraits, have their imaginary
core:
I can't paint from looking at the actual object or person. I
never paint my portraits by asking the person to sit for me.
I start with several quick random sketches from the model
and then shut the door behind me. That is when I am at my
happiest. A sitter can't
ever sit the way your vision develops for that painting.
Although he doggedly retained a Hungarian accent, Gordon's
English was by now fluent, and he allowed his name to be
gently anglicised to "George". Nevertheless, his home town
remained "Vakefielt" to the end. From a terraced house in
the town centre, the Gordons moved in the late 1970s to the
fresher air and clearer perspectives of Heath, on high
ground overlooking Wakefield. In the former village joiner's
shop, which George and Marianne transformed from a ruin into
a home and studio, they welcomed friends and acquaintances
by the score. Conversation was free-flowing and serpentine;
supper generally came late. George in his blue denim
boiler-suit made coffee as carefully as he would mix a
particular tint of rose pink on his palette, and poured it
slowly and with profound concentration, his head on one
side, his eyes narrowed against tobacco smoke.
At Heath, Gordon became gradually more circumspect and
reflective, and in painting he looked now to lyrical
landscape subjects, to emotive portraits of Marianne's
elderly parents. While he was light-hearted and loquacious
in talk, relishing verbal imagery and playing with English
like a new and ever-unfamiliar toy, in his self-portraits
Gordon confronts the states of isolation and aloneness with
a clear, unsentimental eye. Not for him the nine-to-five in
front of the easel, but long nights, on his own, under a
light bulb, into the small dark hours confronting himself
and his image in the mirror.
It is through the self-portraits that Gordon achieved his
most resonant expression. In some he presented himself as
asleep, or dead; out-of-body paintings in which he achieves
the ultimate detachment from the subject. But Gordon did not
repine; instead, his apartness, and his acceptance of the
long inevitable wait, bred a body of work in which
psychological insight is run through with lyricism, and
personal likeness with the tough surface presence of paint.
James Hamilton