Dora Gordine was born into a Jewish family in Libau (now Liepāja), then part of the Russian Empire (now Latvia) in 1895, brought up in Estonia, and studied art in Paris. She became a prominent sculptor and moved to England in 1935, where she exhibited widely and received multiple commissions.
Sculptor Dora Gordine was born Dora Gordin into a middle-class Jewish family in Libau (now Liepāja), then part of the Russian Empire (now Latvia), on 8 June 1895. Throughout her life Gordine was deliberately evasive, frequently manipulating or fabricating details about herself (Black, ‘The Past is Immaterial’). Little is known for certain about her childhood, but her family moved to Reval (now Tallinn), Estonia, in 1912. Interested in sculpture, she was influenced by the pre-First World War artist group Noor Eesti (Young Estonia), who favoured Art Nouveau. By 1917, Gordin was exhibiting her bronze sculptures in Estonia, and she was a naturalised citizen by 1921. She moved to Paris in 1924 to further her studies, adjusting her name to Gordine, perhaps in an effort to conceal her Jewish heritage. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and in 1925 was employed as a mural painter at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. The exhibition of her Chinese Head, also known as The Chinese Philosopher, in Paris in 1926 brought Gordine critical attention. Amid her growing success she commissioned a studio home in Paris from leading French architect Auguste Perret. In 1928, Gordine held a successful solo show at the Leicester Galleries in London and at the Flechtheim Gallery, Berlin. Heavily influenced by art, cultures and sitters from outside western Europe, it has been said that her 'sculpture and painting reflected the contemporary vogue for ‘exotic’ portrait heads of non-Westerners' ('Dora Gordine: A Sculptor's Paintings', Art UK). Around 1929, she was commissioned to make six heads representing people of different ethnic backgrounds for the new Town Hall in what was then British Colonial Singapore, and she spent the following five years in South East Asia, during which time she travelled and married English collector and physician George Herbert Garlick, gaining British citizenship.
In July 1935, Gordine moved to London. The following year she divorced Garlick and married Richard Hare, son of the 4th Earl of Listowel, becoming part of the British liberal, aristocratic, and cultural elite. She designed another studio home called ‘Dorich House’ (a conflation of the names Dora and Richard) in Kingston Vale in 1935-36. The couple occupied the upper apartment, which housed their art and furniture collection, while the lower two floors functioned as a studio and showcase for Gordine's work. She became a major presence in European sculpture, exhibiting widely, and found many sitters for her portraits among London society, including the actress Dame Edith Evans; chairman of Christie’s auctioneers, Sir Alec Martin; and artist and art historian Dugald Sutherland MacColl. Commenting on an exhibition of Gordine's work at the Leicester Galleries, art critic Jan Gordon remarked the show 'suggests that she is very possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor in the world' ('Art and Artists', Observer, 6 November 1938). With the onset of the Second World War, and with the rationing of bronze as foundries manufactured only weapons, Gordine's career stalled. She nevertheless gave lectures to the Royal Asiatic Society 1940-43, and wrote for the Society's journal between 1941 and 1947. After finding a new foundry in 1944, she began exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy and with the Society of Portrait Sculptors until the 1950s. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 1949, and participated in the 1951 Festival of Britain. Among her close friends was Jewish painter, Orovida Pissarro, whom she had met around 1928. In 1956-57, Pissarro commissioned a portrait head of her late father Lucien from Gordine for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1963, Gordine completed her final public commission, a bronze statue measuring three feet high and nine feet long titled Mother and Child for the Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey.
After Richard Hare died from a heart attack in 1966, Gordine lived alone in Dorich House, her fame dwindling in her later years. With the worsening of her eyesight and onset of severe arthritis her creative output ended in the late 1970s. Dora Gordine died in Dorich House, Kingston-upon-Thames, England on 29 December 1991. The largest collection of her work remains at Dorich House, which opened as a museum at Kingston University in 1996 and also functions 'as an international centre to promote and support women creative practitioners' (Dorich House Museum, 2022). In 2006, an exhibition entitled Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine was held at Ben Uri Gallery, and in 2008 a catalogue raisonné of Gordine's work by Dr Jonathan Black (Kingston University) was published, followed by a Dorich House Museum retrospective in 2009. In 2012 Dorich House Museum also organised a loan exhibition to the Adamson-Eric Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. Gordine's work is held in numerous UK public collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, Dorich House Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Tate, Whitworth, University of London, and Leeds Art Gallery.
Dora Gordine in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Dora Gordine]
Publications related to [Dora Gordine] in the Ben Uri Library