Writing in The Spectator in 1938, the poet and critic Arthur Symons reviewed Dora Gordine's exhibition at the Leicester Galleries: 'Her profound sense of pure form in sculpture, heedless alike of realism and of exaggerated abstraction, is united with the subtlest delicacy of modelling, and these qualities combine to endow her bronzes with an abnormal power, an almost uncanny life, which only the sculpture of the greatest civilisations of the past has been able to produce.' Symons and his wife bequeathed Gordine's A Malay Sultana to the Tate Collection.
Gordine was born in St Petersburg. Russia She travelled to Paris in 1925, studied under Aristide Maillol and exhibited at the Salons. Over the next decade she travelled, making busts of people she encountered on her journey's, and a series of bronze sculptures for a government building in Singapore, before moving to England in 1936. In that year she married the diplomat the Hon. Richard Hare, and designed their London home and studio, Dorich House. Gordine's portrait sitters included the actor Edith Evans. In 1947 she travelled to Hollywood, designing film sets and lecturing on art.
The Leicester Galleries held a number of solo shows of Gordine's work. She also exhibited at the Society of Women Artists, and at the Royal Society of British Sculptors, where she was elected a member. Her sculptures are in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and, in the late 1940s, Happy Baby was donated by its owner to the maternity ward of Holloway Prison. Dorich House now holds a collection of Gordine's work, her archive, and the couple's collection of Russian fine and decorative art. |
