One of the last surviving members of the original coterie of artists surrounding André Breton, the impact of Gordon Onslow-Ford’s work went beyond the French branch of the Surrealist movement, planting seeds of artistic theory in New York, Mexico and California to influence some of the most important figures in the development of twentieth-century modernism.

As with so many of his peers, Onslow-Ford’s artistic story begins in Paris, where he arrived in 1937 to a city electrified with artistic ideas and exchange. There, an early friendship blossomed with Chilean architect and artist Roberto Matta, who was then working in collaboration with Le Corbusier, while intensive studies with André Lhote and Fernand Léger laid the foundation for a personal strain of modernism that would span six decades, translating not only into artworks, but also into several important lecture series, the foundation of a non-profit organization, and the inauguration of an MFA program focused specifically on Onslow-Ford’s principal artistic preoccupation: the intersection between art and consciousness.

Onslow-Ford’s involvement with the surrealists began in 1938, just one year into his Paris sojourn when Breton invited the young painter to join the group’s meetings at Café Deux Magots on the Left Bank. It was here that he became close with some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, including Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and Victor Brauner. In the summer of 1939, Onslow-Ford rented a villa in Chemilieu, a town in southwest France near the Swiss border. Joined by friends including Matta, Tanguy, Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Kay Sage, not to mention the regular visits by his neighbors Gerturde Stein and Alice B. Toklas, that exchange of ideas that summer would fuel one of the most important periods in Onslow-Ford’s career.

When war broke out in Europe in the fall of that year, Onslow-Ford was invited to join his surrealist contemporaries in New York, where he organized four exhibitions for the group in 1941. As one of the few native English-speaking members of the group, Onslow-Ford was also asked to give a series of lectures to accompany the exhibitions. The lectures were attended by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, both of whom took cues from Onslow-Ford’s ideas and technical innovations, with intimations of both evident in what crystalized into Abstract Expressionism just a few years later.

For Onslow-Ford, painting was a means to explore and dissect what he referred to as ‘inner worlds’, and as such, the present work seeks to probe our various levels of consciousness through the surrealist practice of psychic automatism. It also bears the influence of the compositional framework he developed throughout the 1940s, when, from late 1941 to 1947, the newly-married painter lived and worked in rural Mexico. Apart from the bustle of the modern metropolis, Onslow-Ford began to paint large, abstracted landscapes which eventually became arrangements akin to solar systems and which would occupy much of his mature work.

The present work’s title, Man Is Space, is perhaps the most indicative of the artist’s preoccupation with the cosmos as an amalgam of the life of the mind. Through his signature visual language of line, circle and dot, what the artist considered the building blocks of the universe, his gestural artistry had found a way to organize itself while still retaining surrealist elements of spontaneous painting. Indeed, here, as in much of his work from the 1960s, the artist also employs his invention of coulage, whereby paint or enamel was poured directly onto the canvas, a technique that directly anticipated the work of Pollock and Hans Hoffman.


THE PRESENT WORK.
When Onslow-Ford returned to the United States, this time it was to California, where he remained for the rest of his life. Initially settling in San Francisco, in 1948, he was given his first retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Today, Onslow-Ford’s paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Britain, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In the early 1960s, the present work was exhibited at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The latter, a solo show of the artist’s work from 1951 to 1962, highlighted Man Is Space on the exhibition’s poster. Subsequently, it hung for many years at Columbia Law School in New York City. Its sister painting, Who Lives, is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.