The painter and graphic designer Gordon House (1932 – 2004) was born in South Wales but grew up in Letchworth Garden City (there was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Broadway Gallery in the town in 2018). Although he produced a large number of paintings and designs in a Modernist style, House is perhaps best known for his work on album covers for the Beatles: he designed the cover of the White Album and the back cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for which his friend Peter Blake famously designed the front.
Portrait of Gordon House, early 1960s (via eyeondesign.aiga.org)
As a young man in the 1950s, Gordon House studied at Luton College of Art, where one of his tutors was Theodor Kern. House writes about the experience in his memoir, Tin-pan Valley, published shortly before his death in 2004:
At Luton’s school of art on a Thursday morning a large, sharp, light-suited Austrian male would take the class. On entering our room for ‘composition’ class he would set up his own corner with one of the studio-littered radial easels, a vertical drawing board propped at his tall painting height and, stacked close by, a good quantity of 30x20in (double crown) cartridge paper. The intriguing aspect for us students was his brought-in mysterious bottle of milky substance to be mixed with pure pigment as he attacked the papers during the course of the day. Although occasionally walking around the class giving tutorials his own output was impressive, always leaving at the end of the session with many created paper works – he would make random gestures on the primed sheets and then find his image. Being a devout Catholic he would arrive at a shrouded ‘Mother and Child’, or a rocky grotto with ‘cavescape’ of the Italian ‘Madonna’ period. His strong-smelling alchemy drew my interest as I discovered that his secret bottled ingredient was an emulsified tempera medium of egg and linseed oil with mastic varnish, a mixture capable of rendering a painting student, used only to white spirit, high by aroma alone. A recipe never to be unwritten. He was Theodore [sic] Kern, a refugee having escaped on foot and train to England from the Nazis, as other artist friends. He was a close colleague of Hans Feibush [sic: actually Feibusch], both members of the Mural Painters Society. Kern told me that during his escape he found himself in an empty railway station and whilst waiting for the only expected remaining train drew a mural scene with charcoal from his pocket, completely decorating the waiting room on his lonely vigil in the desperate hope of leaving a message of peace to a conquering member of the arriving Gestapo.
In this extract House provides us with a vivid and memorable picture of Theodor Kern’s practice both as a teacher and as an artist, somehow managing to add to his own prodigious output while simultaneously overseeing the efforts of his students. We also learn about Kern’s association with fellow refugee artist Hans Feibusch, a German Jewish convert to the Church of England: I’m currently trying to find out more about their friendship, and hope to write about it in a future post. I like the anecdote about Kern’s flight from Austria, and the impromptu mural in the railway station, which adds a nice human touch to the narrative of his journey to England.
Portrait of Gordon House in his studio, late 1960s (via via eyeondesign.aiga.org)
Gordon House must have impressed Kern, since shortly after he left art college, his former tutor took him on as an assistant:
After leaving art school, my first employment as a stop gap I became Kern’s assistant at his studio in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. We made ecclesiastic sculpture and repaired Stations of the Cross in churches damaged in the London blitz. To fulfil his need for material on sculpture commissions I would borrow a cob horse and cart from my farming friends ‘The Rutts’ and head for the brick works through the villages or Ickleford and Arlesey to the London Brick Co. with its many high chimneys, seen for miles around, known for its ‘Arlesey Whites’ or ‘London Stock Bricks’. There, through the vast works to the kiln area I would be loaded with a glistening, metre square block of blue, malleable unfired clay. Getting back to my master’s delight, this would become our modelled sculptures on the way to being cast in concrete. I was gladly paid a £1 a day, although not a Catholic myself, we worked under a hanging real palm cross in a garden workshop/studio. He once sent me to work on my own in St Aslum and St Cecelia [sic: actually St Anselm and St Cecilia] in Holborn – for me an exciting venture to the big city, in a building close to the subway station and ironically to be visited much later the adjacent Central School of Art. Meanwhile Kern would be visiting the Monks of Buckfast Abbey for commissioned work. He would return with a monk’s habit or chalice as props for the latest sculpture. I wore a coarse monk’s habit as the model for a Sacred Heart sculpture eventually to be high on a building in Warwickshire. Also I recall mixing 5cwt of plaster in a cup, little by little, which took days, making a split mould for the eventual Sacred concrete statue, all in his garden studio beneath a palm-leaf cross hung from the roof.
In the studio, to my surprise, I once observed my master finding reference to an eagle, which was to be at the feet of the statue, from the front cover emblem of the ‘Eagle’ comic. Perhaps in the country immediate graphic representation of the eagle species was rare, like the magnificent bird? Today, what I then regarded as a rather basic source of reference would possibly be an intellectual choice and thought of as a modish norm in the field of the ‘Pop’ artist. Kern was able to work daily supplying the demands of his church. One of the many souls exiled from their native land able to survive. I still have the highest respect for his won independence. The sculptor eventually moved further into the country.
This second extract provides us further glimpses of Kern’s working practices, this time as a sculptor. Once again, the account is full of vivid details: House driving a horse and cart to the local brick works to find materials that would ‘delight’ Kern, and the young assistant dressing up to pose for his ‘master’. We also get a glimpse of Kern’s home studio, which seems to have extended into his garden, so that his work would have been carried out partly al fresco, beneath a real palm cross. And then there is the very human image of the devout and serious-minded sculptor, basing part of a religious sculpture on an illustration in a children’s comic.
Church of St Anselm and St Cecilia, Holborn Kingsway, London (via ianvisits.co.uk)
According to Ernst Ziegeleder’s incomplete catalogue of Theodor Kern’s public works, he was commissioned to work on the Stations of the Cross at the church of St Anselm and St Cecilia in 1955, so this must be the period when House was working for him. I can’t find any reference in Ziegeleder’s list to a Sacred Heart statue in Warwickshire. However, Kern carved similar statues for churches in Winchester in 1953-4, and in Warrington in 1954-5, so perhaps House misremembered the location. I wrote about the Winchester Sacred Heart statue, and reproduced a photograph of it, in this post.
An article about Gordon House in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists mentions that he worked as an assistant to ‘Theador [sic] Kern’ and adds ‘notably on the ecclesiastical sculptures of Buckfast Abbey in South Devon’, which slightly contradicts (or alternatively , is contradicted by) House’s recollection that he was in Holborn while his ‘master’ was with the monks of Buckfast. House’s final statement, that Kern would later move ‘further into the country’ must also be a mistaken memory. Theodor Kern was already installed at 55 Bearton Green in Hitchin when House went to work for him, and he would stay there until he died.
Because Theodor Kern has been dead for 50 years, because we lack a proper biography of the artist, and because he seems to have been determined to live a modest and hidden life in a provincial market town, these rare glimpses of the man by those who knew him are invaluable, and bring the artist vividly to life.
Theodor Kern 