FREDERICK GORE CBE RA (1913 – 2009)

was born in Richmond, the son of Spencer Gore, one of the key founders of the Modern Movement in the art of this country.

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If you walk in to a room hung only with Freddy Gore’s paintings, you will be quite enchanted with the delights he had taken in what he had seen and his wonderful use of colour. But his landscapes painted on the spot for example in Majorca, Greece and France are also accurate descriptions of places and you are drawn to go there and explore the exact location. His first trip to New York was in 1980, immediately marveling at the unexpected colour that he found there and the opportunity it gave him to work on a new series of paintings. Frederick Gore studied painting at the Ruskin School while reading classics at Oxford and subsequently at the Westminster Art School (where Mark Gertler was a strong influence) and later at the Slade (sharing a Charlotte Street flat above that of Cedric Morris whose work he always admired).

He first exhibited as a student at Ruskin School shows at the Madox Gallery and at Coolings, as well as at the Mayor Gallery and the New English. He gave his first one-man show in the autumn after he left the Slade of works painted at Les-Baux-de-Provence. He had sold thirty of his first paintings to a second hand dealer off the Tottenham Court Road to scrape together enough money to go there; he stayed on through the generosity of the family of Pierre Monteux who presided over a summer school of conducting there. This show led to a private commission to paint in Greece. He spent eight months there, and the following autumn showed his Greek paintings at the Galerie Borghese in Paris, with a catalogue introduction by Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had once coined the phrase “fauve”. These were later shown at the Stafford Gallery in London, and he returned to Paris and then Greece until the war broke out.

From 1940 to 1946 he served in the army, then between 1949 and 1962 he had five one-man exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery and one at the Juster Gallery, New York. He also exhibited at the Contemporary Art Society Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in 1954, 1956 and 1958.

He taught at the Westminster, Epsom and Chelsea Schools of Art and was Head of Painting at St.Martin’s School of Art from1950 to 1979. He became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1964 and an Academician in 1973; Chairman of the Committee for loan exhibitions from1976 to 1987, and he was a key figure during the revival of the Academy during those decades. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at Gainsborough House, Sudbury and the Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery (1979). In his 1989 his Retrospective in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy attracted seventeen thousand visitors. Recently of course there have been retrospectives at the Richmond Hill Gallery.

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There are many works in public, corporate and private collections including Southampton, Plymouth, Doncaster and Reading Art Galleries, the Rutherstein Collection, Manchester, the Beaverbrook Foundation, New Brunswick; the department of the Environment, the Contemporary Art Society, Leicestershire County Council; the Government Art Collection and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

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His writings on art include:

Abstract Art – Methuen, 1956

Painting: Some Basic Principles – Vista Rheinhard, 1965

Piera della Francesca, The Baptism – Cassell, 1969