SFMOMA, Part 38: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Seductions of the Day (Gordon Onslow Ford, 1943).
A dense field of biomorphic marks — pointillist, barely visible, accumulating — forms that breathe and dissolve. Seductions of the Day, 1943, oil on canvas, 31¾ by 43½ inches, bequeathed by the artist's widow in 1982. Mexico-period Onslow Ford, and it's doubly framed: an interior wooden strip inside the outer frame, a decision the artist made, as if the painting needed an airlock between itself and the world.
The man who poured first
Gordon Onslow Ford, 1912–2003 — British naval officer turned Surrealist, one of the great might-have-beens who turned out to be a was. He joined Breton's circle through Matta, arrived in New York, and in 1941 gave a series of lectures at the New School on Surrealism that became legend: the audience reportedly included Pollock, Gorky, Motherwell. He was transmitting automatism to the Americans alongside Matta — the two of them, the Englishman and the Chilean, the conduit pair.
And he poured paint before Pollock. In 1939 Onslow Ford was laying canvases on the floor and pouring Ripolin enamel — coulages — years before the drip paintings. The history books gave the priority to Pollock; the fact remains on the record. His credo: "making the invisible visible." The 1943 canvas is exactly that program — marks that are barely marks, forms that seduce the day into showing what it hides.
Mexico, 1941–47: he followed the Surrealist exodus south, grew close to Wolfgang Paalen — Luchita Hurtado's husband, the Dynaton theorist — and absorbed the Mexican light and the pre-Columbian depth. Then back north: in 1951 he co-founded the Dynaton group in the Bay Area with Paalen and Lee Mullican, the short-lived movement that tried to make San Francisco a center of visionary abstraction. Then Inverness, on the Point Reyes peninsula — 1957 or 1958, the records wobble — where he lived and painted for the rest of his life, ninety-one years, still working. At ninety he said he felt he was "just beginning."
So here's the thesis: Seductions of the Day is Onslow Ford's Mexico-period argument for the invisible — 1943, biomorphic marks accumulating like breath, double-framed as if the vision needs protection, from the man who lectured Pollock on Surrealism and poured paint on the floor before Pollock did. "Making the invisible visible" wasn't a slogan; it was a naval officer's discipline applied to the unconscious. He lived to ninety-one, painted to the end, and said at ninety he was just beginning. The seductions never stopped. 🌁
Timeline — Gordon Onslow Ford
1912 — born December 26, Wendover, England
1930s — Royal Navy; joins Breton's Surrealist circle via Matta
1939 — pours enamel on floor-laid canvases (coulages), before Pollock
1941 — New School lectures; audience includes Pollock, Gorky, Motherwell
1941–47 — Mexico; close to Wolfgang Paalen
1943 — paints Seductions of the Day
1951 — co-founds Dynaton in the Bay Area
1957/58 — moves to Inverness, Point Reyes
2003 — dies November 9, Inverness, age 90