Gordon Onslow Ford (1912 – 2003)
Gordon Onslow Ford (1912 – 2003)
Checkmate, 1940
Oil on canvas
76 x 102 cm
Onslow Ford left his training as an officer in the British Royal Navy to travel to Paris and pursue a career in painting. He met Surrealist founder André Breton and became part of the Surrealist group, joining their meetings at Café Deux Magots. He became friends with Robert Matta, Yves Tanguy and others, making frequent trips to the studios of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Giorgio de Chirico. He was predominantly interested in dreams, recording and making sketches of his own dream experiences. Unlike many Surrealists, who were interested in Freud’s theory of dreams, Onslow Ford was drawn to Carl Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious, and he aimed to express what he believed lay beyond the personal in dreams.
Onslow Ford left Paris at the outbreak of World War II, and painted this work during the year that he lived in England, before sailing to America in 1941. He is reported as commenting, while looking at a study of this work, ‘At that time it seemed hopeless. The white and blue planes are two opposed entities that refer to the uncertain fate of England in 1940.’[i] Onslow Ford was invited to give lectures on the Surrealist movement in New York, talks that he gave at the New School for Social Research in 1941 and which had a profound impact on a younger generation of American artists including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.
Jeffrey Sherwin purchased this painting in 1991 and wrote to Onslow Ford to ask him about the work. Onslow Ford explained, ‘This painting is in transition from the symbolic world of dreams to the spaces of the mind beyond. It deals with the interconnectedness of all forms of life. I can recognise a reclining figure that I associate with Mother Earth and an active chimney volcano giving off white dotted lines that I associate with the universal force of creation. I was more guided by spontaneous intuition that preconceived ideas – though I perforce built on what I had already discovered.’ His letter is included in the Sherwin Family Archive, which is held at The Hepworth Wakefield and can be consulted by booking with the archive, archive@hepworthwakefield.org
Provenance:
Gift by the artist to Robert Melville;
Purchased at Phillips, London, 11 November 1991 by Jeffrey Sherwin
By descent to Sherwin Family Collection, permanently housed at The Hepworth Wakefield
[i] Gordon Onslow Ford: Paintings and Works on Paper 1939 -1951, exhibition catalogue (Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York) 2010, p. 11
Exhibition History:
Santiago de Compostela, Fundación Eugenio Granell. Onslow Ford: Seeing in Depth 1998
Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), British Surrealism & Other Realities 23 May – 17 August 2008
Leeds Art Gallery, British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye 10 July – 1st November 2009
The Hepworth Wakefield, When Dreams Confront Reality: The Sherwin Collection 17 March 2022 – 7 January 2022
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, When Dreams Confront Reality: Surrealism in Britain 13 October 2023 to 7 January 2024
The Hepworth Wakefield, Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes 21 November 2024 – 21 April 2026, touring to The Box (24 May 2025 – 07 Sep 2025) and Museum Arnhem (11 Oct 2025 until 22 Feb 2026)
Literature:
Onslow Ford: Seeing in Depth exhibition catalogue (Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela) 1998.
Gordon Onslow Ford: Paintings and Works on Paper 1939 -1951, exhibition catalogue (Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York) 2010, p. 11 (ill.)
British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, exhibition catalogue (Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds) 2009, (eds. Silvano Levy and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall), p.150
Jeffrey Sherwin, From France to England: British Surrealism Opened Up (Bradford: Northern Artists Gallery Ltd, 2014), p. 38
Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes (Thames & Hudson, London) 2024, (ed. Eleanor Clayton), p. 18-19, 30 and 56 (ill.)
