Jan and Cora Gordon and "Many-sidedness"


I was thinking today about what an interesting couple Jan and Cora Gordon were. From their marriage in 1909 to Jan’s death in 1944 the output of paintings, drawings, etchings, books, magazine articles and concerts seems remarkable. For a way in to their world of travels, art and music visit these pages: Art of Jan and Cora Gordon.


I like this comment from one of Jan Gordon’s obituaries: “Mr Gordon's many-sidedness had a touch of the Italian Renaissance.”

I also like Jack Bilbo’s comment in the October 1944 issue of The Studio magazine: “I remember when he and Cora used to sit in my den on Saturday afternoons when the gallery was closed, when we exchanged travel experiences from Spain and Yugoslavia, from Mexico and Scandinavia, or talked about artists and paintings, how the four walls of my little room seemed to move away into far distances.”

I know some highly multifaceted, well-travelled and creative personalities today, but can’t think of anyone quite as productive as these two.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stone axes from the highlands of Papua New Guinea

Image
The story of first contact in 1933 with the peoples of the central Wahgi Valley in the Papuan highlands is a remarkable one. An unsuspected group of thriving stone-age cultures came to the attention of the outside world when the Leahy brothers first flew over the area and later reached it on foot. Tribal men carried elaborate stone axes and this contact with extant stone-age cultures provided fascinating insights on how their stone tools, such as axes and adzes were hafted. The available evidence was collated in Burton's (1984) Thesis at the Australia National University, on "AXE MAKERS OF THE WAHGI: Pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands." I saw a number of these old axes during a visit to the highlands near Mount Hagen in October 2018 (see the Paiya chief photograph below). The area of that journey is shown in the google Earth image shown below. The upper Wahgi River valley with locations of Paiya Village, Mount Giluwe and Mount Hagen t
Read more

A Merovingian Croix Ancrée Tremissis, Sutton Hoo, and Declining Gold Content in the 7th Century Coinage

Image
In the recent Netflix film "The Dig" there is a scene in which Basil Brown's character shows a small gold coin, known as a tremissis, to Edith Pretty, confirming that the ship burial at Sutton Hoo is of Anglo Saxon age as he had previously suspected. A Merovingian tremissis found in Kent, 10 mm across 37 such coins, all from Merovingian Francia, were found at Sutton Hoo, associated with the remains of an elaborate purse. These coins have commanded a great deal of attention as a potential means to constrain the date of the burial. This is a highly imprecise process (the coins are not datable to within a range shorter than 16 years), relying on recognising issues associated with known rulers, identifying the youngest of these, speculating from there as to how much younger the undated coins may be, and then how much later the assembled group was deposited in the ship burial. Plan of  the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 burial chamber in Burger et al (2016), combined from versions by Phil
Read more

From Nike, Winged Goddess of Victory, to an Angel in Three Coins

Image
A winged goddess of victory has been a widespread image over the past two and a half millennia. Here I illustrate her transformation from Greek goddess to Roman goddess to Christian angel with three coins spanning a period of about 900 years.  She, Nike , appears in Archaic form in a statue from Delos , dating to the 6th century BCE and found in front of the old Temple of Artemis in 1887. A famous 5th century BCE sculpture of Nike by Paionios was found at Olympia in 1875 and the even more famous Winged Victory of Samothrace , dating to the second century BCE, was found in 1863. Nike also appeared on coins and a beautiful ancient Greek example from the fourth century BCE shows this winged goddess of victory carrying a wreath and a naval stylis (what appears to be a staff with angled trident head).   Reverse of gold stater of Alexander III (The Great), Ake mint, dating to 308/9 BCE, showing Nike with wreath in right hand and stylis in left hand. In her later Roman guise as the goddess
Read more