Gordon House

From MARLBOROUGH GRAPHICS (marlboroughgraphicsnewyork.com):

Gordon House was born in Pontardawe, South Wales in 1932. At the age of fourteen, House accepted a grant to study art. He attended both the Luton School of Art in Bedfordshire and St. Albans School of Art in Hertfordshire. Upon graduation from art school, House worked at an advertising agency. House utilized the typography and graphic design skills he gained throughout the rest of his career. He eventually would go on to work as an independent graphic designer and typographer.

In the early days of his career as an artist, House created monumental works of abstracted landscape scenes. House was an important participant in the London art scene of the 1960s.

House produced his first prints in 1961. He is known for working in mediums including screenprint, etching, woodcut, and lithography.  He helped to elevate screenprinting’s status in London to become recognizable as an art form, not only used for commercial purposes. A 1981 retrospective of House’s prints was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The exhibition was later shown at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

House’s work can be found in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England; Tate Gallery in London, England; Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York, Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana; Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.  

In 1967, through his connexions with artist Peter Black and art dealer Robert Fraser, Gordon House, along with Gene Mahon and Al Vandenberg, designed the back sleeve of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. He was in charge of the typography elements of the back sleeve.

A year later, in 1968, he worked again for The Beatles, in collaboration with Richard Hamilton, to conceive the packaging of the White Album. He came up with the idea of putting a white-on-white …

In 1970, he collaborated with designer Roger Huggett to design the packaging for Paul McCartney’s first solo album, “McCartney.”

He designed the packaging of Wings’s first album, “Wild Life,” in 1971, as well as the design for the “Red Rose Speedway” in 1972.

A couple of years later, he collaborated with Storm Thorgerson, of the influential album design agency Hipgnosis, forming a company called GSP Productions which made a promo video for “Band on the Run”, the third studio album by Paul McCartney and Wings, in 1975.

Gordon and I were born just three days apart, in June 1932 – he was the older by those three days. We were friends for more than 50 years. I was introduced to Gordon by Richard Smith, a fellow student at the Royal College of Art. Dick and Gordon had been students together at St Albans School of Art.

We probably met first at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where our generation exhibited and socialised. Both of us had exhibitions there and at the New Vision Centre, which was at the cutting edge of painting for the young artists of our generation. We later would both show at the Robert Fraser Gallery and Waddington Galleries.

There are very few artists who are equally comfortable and talented at being both a painter and graphic designer and Gordon House was one such.

We often worked together as designers, notably when I did the front cover of the LP by the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Gordon was responsible for the typography on the back of the record.

He went on to work on the White Album for the Beatles with Richard Hamilton, then on further Beatles recordings and, later, most of Paul McCartney’s records.

Peter Blake – Obituary for Gordon House, 2004

Selected highlights from the total 26 minutes of Osterley rushes also went into an extended promotional film for Band On The Run made in 1975. Running close on eight minutes, visualised by Clive Arrowsmith and produced under the banner GSP by the art directors Storm Thorgerson and Gordon House (Paul’s painter friend who helped him design the McCartney album sleeve in 1970 and, for a while, employed CS designer Roger Huggett), the film embraced extracts from the title song, ‘1985’, ‘Mrs Vandebilt’ and ‘Bluebird’ and combined some of the moving images from Osterley with animation and still photographs.

Mark Lewisohn – From Club Sandwich N°77, Spring 1996

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