Jan and Cora Gordon

I just came across a warmly-written obituary of Jan Gordon from the "Liverpool Daily Post," reprinted in the Staffordshire Advertiser of Saturday 5th February 1944. " Jan Gordon, whose death I have to record with great regret, had been for some time the London art critic of the 'Daily Post.' He was sixty-one, and had been battling against ill-health for years, but it never reduced his gusto. He was an extraordinary zestful man, most happily united to another enthusiastic student of life.  The books by Jan and Cora Gordon went under the skin of the land they travelled over with such gaiety and with such inexhaustible interest in people and places. He liked old civilizations, but as his 6,000 miles' journey across the United States in an ancient motor showed, he was equally alive to new. He was alive, in fact, to everything he touched.  His art criticism was deeply informed, but humane and humorous. He was a musician and an excellent performer on the Sp...

In her segment on "Activities in London" in The New York Times of December 18, 1932, Ruth Green Harris writes the following comments on English contemporary art, the quality of Cora Gordon's drawings and the book for art students being written by Jan Gordon. " It seems to me the English artist is at his best when he does brilliant character drawings. They are too full of character to be called caricature. Here craftsmanship is used to a beautiful end, for the artist has reached beyond the technical business, has recovered from the art school, and can buckle down to his - art. Cora Gordon's drawings, for instance. She never stops drawing with a command that cannot be translated into any other medium. You look at a a head and say to yourself it is such and such. But it isn't. There is no right word because she has used just the right line. And this cunning is English. Perhaps a Frenchman does not leave himself so completely out of the subject. These draw...

In The New York Times of June 3rd 1928 is an article by Jan and Cora Gordon  on "Coney Island as a World Show." The newspaper introduced the article with, " European visitors view the resort as a happy babel where our new citizens from far lands romp on the sand, revel in the mechanical thrills and chatter in their native tongues. " "Rollicking Coney Island, now ready to meet the Summer multitudes with new frills and thrills, is always a source of wonder to the visitor from overseas. In the following article two English artists who have been 'motor vagabonds' in many countries set forth their impressions of this truly American playground." " Coney Island's multitude swirls over boardwalk and beach like human graffiti " Much of the text of the article is later reused in " On Wandering Wheels " (1929), including the account of the German "professional wild man" , who, as a supper companion of the Gor...

The New York Times of November 27th 1927, carries an article on a show at the New York Weyhe Galleries by Jan and Cora Gordon . " Jan Gordon and his wife, Cora J. Gordon, have spent several months in this country, 'vagabonding'; and now they have come to New York to exhibit some of their pictures at the Weyhe Galleries . Mr. Gordon's book on modern French painting is well known, and the two English artists have collaborated, besides, in writing several delightful books of travel, illustrated with work done along the way. While a few of the pictures shown here were painted in this country (notably some farm scenes), most of them take the spectator further afield, to Albania , Portugal and Southern Spain . These studies bring one into close and delightfully informal contact with places that cease to be aloof or strange. The travelers never enter with fanfare, through a prepared front door. They prefer to slip into a place quite simply, quite humbly, and, from the ...

I recently found this obituary for Jan Gordon in the New York Times of February 3rd 1944. " JAN GORDON DIES; ARTIST, MUSICIAN British Author, Lecturer and Traveler - Expert Player of Guitar, Mandolin By Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. LONDON, Feb. 2 - Godfrey Jervis Gordon, artist, author, art critic, folk musician, lecturer and traveler, who wrote under the name Jan Gordon, died today at his home in London. He would have been 62 years old on March 11. Of his many books, ' Modern French Painters ' is outstanding for its lucid analysis of the aims of such movements as Cubism. He had a wide knowledge of the folk music of various countries and was an expert player of such instruments as the guitar and mandolin and knew a good deal about their construction and history. The son and grandson of clergymen, Jan Gordon, to use the name by which he was generally known, was educated at Marlborough College and the Truro School of Mines. In the first World War he was chief d...

Reading "The Letters of Virginia Woolf " (1912-1922), I came across a mention of the Athenaeum in her letter to Vanessa Bell , dated Sunday 23rd March 1919. She writes, " Our chief amusement now is Murry and the Athenaeum. " John Middleton Murry had just become editor of this venerable magazine, at the age of 30. There is later a brief mention of Jan Gordon: " It is rather fun about the Athenaeum, as every one is to write what they like, and Mrs Ward is to be exposed, and in time they hope to print imaginative prose by me - Murry has got a man called John Gordon, a very bad painter he says, to do art criticism; but I suggested that he'd much better get Duncan to the important things at any rate - not that Duncan is exactly fluent in composition, but I don't see why he and I and you shouldn't maunder about in picture galleries, and what with his genius and your sublimity and my perfectly amazing gift of writing English we might turn out articl...

In "The New Age," January 1st, 1920, Ezra Pound  (American modernist poet and critic) writes (as " B.H. Dias "), on an exhibition of "The Nation's War Paintings and Other Records, Imperial War Museum." He gives Jan Gordon special mention for achieving the feel of war. " Jan Gordon's 374 looks as if it were by the same hand as 377, but it has the atmosphere of its subject, possibly attained by the masks on the operators; yet there are bandages in 377, and the feeling of eeriness, of the uncanny and unusual could as well have been produced by bandages as by masks. No, the first real demarcation we find in this show, apart from differences of "school," is just this question of getting the feel of war, the feel of the evil and uncanny: some of the pictures are full of it, others are just attempts to evade the issue; to pass off what might have been an old landscape painted in 1898 for a fulfilment of the nation's commission to...