Gordon Onslow Ford - Surrealist

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Gordon Onslow Ford (1912 � 2003) was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding Andr� Breton. Born in England in 1912 to a family of artists, Gordon Onslow Ford began painting at an early age. His grandfather, Edward Onslow Ford, was a renowned Victorian sculptor. At the age of 11 he began painting landscapes under the guidance of his uncle. Following the death of his father at age 14, he was sent to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. The ocean affected him deeply and his early works depicted ocean scenes. The metaphor of taking a �voyage� later became an important aspect of his paintings.

He then left the Royal Navy and spent 1936-39 in Paris as a painter. Largely self-taught in art, though he made frequent visits to the studio of Fernand L�ger. He met Chilean architect Roberto Matta in 1937 and was greatly impressed by his recent drawings. Matta, who was working with le Corbusier, was an accomplished draftsman and was making small drawings on the side. Onslow Ford, with his keen sense of seeing, admired Matta's drawings as "the most exciting images" he had seen in Paris.

He encouraged Matta to continue with his drawings, which eventually inspired Matta to shift his direction from architecture to painting. In Brittany with Matta in the summer of 1938 he abandoned working from nature and started to make automatic drawings. In 1938, Andr� Breton invited Onslow Ford to join the Surrealist group in Paris and attend their meetings in Caf� deux Magots. Onslow Ford then became friends with Pierre Mabille, Andr� Breton, Yves Tanguy, Esteban Frances, Wolfgang Paalen, Max Ernst and Victor Brauner among others. His love of painting also led him to collect paintings and frequently visit the studios of Picasso, Mir�, de Chirico and Andr� Masson.

In the summer of 1939, Onslow Ford rented a chateau at Chemilleu near the border of Switzerland, and invited several of his friends to stay for a couple of months. Among the friends were Andr� Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Esteban Frances and Kay Sage. They spent the summer painting, exchanging ideas and reading poetry. They were visited regularly by their friend and neighbour Gertrude Stein.

Onslow Ford lived in New York from 1939 to 1941, where his first one-man exhibition was at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1940. He gave a series of lectures at the New School for Social Research 1940-41 expounding the principles of automatism; these lectures are said to have had an influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism. He was included in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism in New York in 1942. Between 1941 and 1947 he lived in an isolated village in Mexico, where he was influenced by the art of the Tarascon Indians and where he gradually turned away from Surrealism. He settled in California 1947 and died in 2003 at the age of ninety.