Jan and Cora Gordon

The Liverpool Daily Post of Thursday 06 March 1941 carried a commentary by Jan Gordon on a London exhibition of works by the Swiss-born  Paul Klee  ( 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) . SURREALISM AGAIN: Paul Klee’s Art By Jan Gordon " An exhibition of works by the German-Swiss artist, Paul Klee , whose death in Switzerland last year passed almost unnoticed, has just been opened at the Leicester Galleries.  It is not an exhibition which the normal spectator will easily understand. In fact, one might say that passing round the walls hung with Klee’s small, strange works, he will come at last —if he lasts so long—to a drawing. No. 49. It represents roughly a head. There is a vague, twisted, bothered face, but the brain-pan has been ploughed up into blocks.  If the spectator will give this little longer consideration, he may come to feel that it just about represents his own state of mind after having gone round some forty of Klee’s paintings. For Klee is, no doubt, the most

What were Jan and Cora Gordon doing a century ago? Well, they were busy rebuilding their careers as artists following the war. Jan Gordon had an exhibition under the title "War and Peace" at the Little Art Rooms, Duke Street, London. P.G. Konody, Jan Gordon's old mentor at "The Observer" wrote: " He, too, has been attracted by the witchery of the "Dazzleship" which seems to draw every painter - every painter, at least, who has as pronounced a feeling for definite form, effective pattern, and emphatic colour as Lieut. Gordon. When he recorded his impressions of Serbia, at the time when he was doing Red Cross service with the defeated Serbian armies, he embodied his love of definition and bright colour in a series of drawings, some of which figure in the present show. That his preoccupation with broad decorative effects does not preclude subtle observation of significant details is proved by such touches as the nervous action of the hand hol