James Hamilton
A Hungarian Painter in
Yorkshire
György Gordon (1924–2005)
György Gordon was, through and through, a Hungarian painter. This is
despite the fact that he spent the greater part of his working life in the small
English city of Wakefield, in the industrial heartland of West Yorkshire, 260 km
from London. There, from the early 1960s until his death, Gordon became a
greatly loved teacher of painting to generations of Foundation students at
Wakefield College of Art, and grew to become a landscape, figure and portrait
painter of considerable importance in Britain. A retrospective exhibition of his
portraits was held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1995.
[...]
György and Marianne Gordon became naturalized British subjects in 1964,
the year György was appointed to the post of lecturer in Graphic Design at
Wakefield Art College, while Marianne taught piano. 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. As a consequence of his immersion in
teaching, Gordon had to restrict his own painting to vacations, while drawing
at weekends. This concentration of his energies generated periods of intense
productivity, and launched a new and often violent expression of emotion and
anger in paintings which reflected early and more recent experiences such as
Refugees (1964–5) and Crawling Wounded Torso (1969). Such drawings as
Screaming Male Torso (1970) and Study for Homo Sapiens (1971) have clear
responses to Gordon's wartime experiences, which, even after nearly thirty
years, were still being released. It was these works, and others like them, that
filled Wakefield Art Gallery in 1974. Local critics compared him to Francis
Bacon, an observation that was inevitable, but thoughtless, boring and wrong.
Goya or Géricault would have been nearer the mark, if ambitious. Another series
of the early 1970s was Organisms, dark and troubling organic forms with thick
impasto that puckers like a rash out of smooth flowing paint.
György Gordon: Organism I, 1971. Oil on board, 50.7 x 57.9 cm
During the 1970s, figures with faceless forms, and rounded, doll-like
bodies, emerge from Gordon's pencil. They reveal perhaps the gentle side of
the artist's nature, but also reveal something that had been becoming more
and more apparent, his reluctance to allow eye contact with his subjects. Very
few of Gordon's portraits or figure groups permit eye contact, which may have
some kind of connection with his experience as a prisoner under interrogation.
Be that as it may, Gordon's pacific manner with the pencil or conté crayon
coaxes the form into existence with affirmative cross-hatching which gives a
velvety and rounded texture to the figure. This clearly recalls the work of his
early teachers, in particular Barcsay. Though created through what amounts to
a gentle massage, Gordon's intention in the late 1970s was to reduce form to
a minimum, and rid himself of anything that seemed to be unnecessary. He
recalled that he was at the time trying to "rewrite the figure", and do the
maximum with the minimum means.
Gordon took close account of twentieth-century art history, the work of
artist predecessors and his contemporaries. Seminal influences were the work
of Honoré Daumier which he saw at the 1961 Tate exhibition, and Chaim
Soutine, who had been a constant inspiration since he had seen Soutine's
paintings in reproduction in Hungary. The examples of both of these artists
allowed Gordon's mastery of creamy paint to suggest emotion and mood in a
group of imaginary portraits that typify his method of work. In Flattened Self-
Portrait (1971) Gordon experiments with black, a non-colour surface, with a
low-toned pinkish grey dropped into it at the lips. The artist presents himself as
dead, perhaps even enclosed in a coffin. "Here I was associating immigration
with death", he told me. "Changing your home life, as I did, is a sort of death."
György Gordon: Self-Portrait
Drawing, 1960. Charcoal on paper, 45 x 32 cm
[...]
James Hamilton
is a writer and curator, whose books and exhibitions explore aspects of art and science
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His biographies of J. M. W. Turner (1997)
and Michael Faraday (2002) led to his more recent book London Lights—The Minds
that Moved the City that Shook the World 1805–1851 (2007).
His exhibition Turner and Italy, shown in Ferrara and Edinburgh, was also mounted by
the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, in 2009.
