György Gordon was born in Budapest, Hungary on 13 June 1924, and studied at the city's Academy of Fine Art. In 1964 he moved to Wakefield, England, where he took up a post as Lecturer of Graphic Design at the College of Art; he taught at the college for over 20 years. In his paintings, which he exhibited widely, Gordon - deeply rooted in European expressionism - investigated his continuing sense of dislocation and alienation, creating distorted images of the human form and intense self portraits.
Graphic artist György Gordon (Gluck) was born on 13 June 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a solicitor. He received his first art training before the Second World War in private academies in Budapest and, from 1948 to 1953, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the city under the avant-garde artists János Kmetty, Róbert Berény and Jeno Barcsay. As a teenager, he became a part-time ancillary ambulanceman in Budapest, and witnessed terrifying events which would haunt him all his life, including a German army lorry driver who had been crushed by his own vehicle, but was still alive when transported to the ambulance. Following the sudden death of his mother, the failure of his first marriage to cartoonist Marta Edinger, and the rise of the Socialist regime in Hungary in 1956, Gordon left for the USA with his six-year-old daughter Anna. Upon their arrival, Gordon was suspected as a communist, interrogated, sent to an internment camp and eventually deported back to Europe. He and Anna were imprisoned separately: she was transported to Germany, while Gordon was forced to remain in Salzburg in Austria. He lost track of Anna for three months; however, after his release the Red Cross reunited them in London. For the next five years, Gordon worked in Salzburg as a commercial artist. In 1961 he married fellow Hungarian expatriate, and student at Royal Academy of Music, Marianne Mozes.
In 1964 the couple moved to Wakefield, England, where Gordon took up a post as Lecturer of Graphic Design at the College of Art, while Marianne gave piano lessons. Gordon taught at the college for over 20 years, taking over responsibility for the painting department in 1972; a gifted and much-loved teacher, he inspired generations of students. Although full-time teaching left him little time for his own painting, from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s he produced semi-abstract images inspired by his Hungarian experiences and intense self-portraits, which were shown in a number of exhibitions, the first at the Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1966. In his paintings, rooted in European Expressionism, Gordon investigated his continuing sense of dislocation and alienation, creating distorted images of the human form in a sombre palette of brown, grey and black, a powerful form of expression for his memories of trauma. His experience as a prisoner under interrogation in the USA also informed these works, while his time as an ambulanceman and the memory of the flattened ribs of the German army driver re-emerged in the 1960s to form the powerful and disturbing Torso series, which included Refugees (1964-65) and Crawling, Wounded Torso (1969), both reminiscent of the flayed images of Chaim Soutine.
In 1968 Gordon exhibited still lifes, portraits and paintings inspired by human form at Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. The Guardian art critic Robert Waterhouse commented: ‘[…] in the paintings based on human anatomy has his imagination fully found its outlet. Gordon sees in a hunched or bloated body the summary of the human condition, and to it he gives a helpless, tragic power […]. The sad image of Icarus vainly soaring to escape his fate is particularly relevant to this philosophy, and Gordon paints Icarus with fluent though broken majesty’ (Waterhouse 1968, p. 4). During the 1970s, the subject of faceless figures, such as Man and Woman (1973–4) appeared. From the mid-1980s, after moving to a cottage on Heath Common, known as the Joiner’s Shop, Gordon’s focus shifted to include landscapes, still lifes and interiors, characterised by a lighter colour palette. He also produced a series of 'homage' portraits of prominent European artist and writers, including Soutine, Ferenc Karinthy and Franz Kafka. In 1986, Gordon had a one-man exhibition at the Jablonski Gallery in London, and, in 1989, Leeds City Art Gallery organised a retrospective. Gordon returned to Hungary in 1978 to hold an exhibition of paintings in a prominent private venue, Fényes Adolf Gallery. In 1992, he was finally given an exhibition at the National Szechenyi Library, Budapest. In 1995, a touring exhibition, Gyorgy Gordon: Portraits and Figurative Work 1956-1993, organised by Huddersfield Art Gallery, was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Although suffering from severe heart problems, in 2002 he was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a group portrait of the Sheffield-based Lindsay Quartet. György Gordon died in Wakefield, England on 5 May 2005. His work is represented in UK public collections including the Hepworth Wakefield, National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, among others.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [György Gordon]
Publications related to [György Gordon] in the Ben Uri Library