Biography
Max Gordon (b. Cape Town, South Africa 1931 - d.1990) was an architect who trained at Cambridge University, at the Architectural Association London and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA. He worked under Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore Owings & Merrill in New York before returning to London, where he eventually formed his own practice at the age of fifty. He designed the first Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London, from an old paint warehouse, in 1985, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and and the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. He went to design spaces for artists Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra and Joel Shapiro, and gallerists Paula Cooper, Brooke Alexander, Maeght-Lelong and Lorence-Monk in New York and Anthony d'Offay and Annely Juda in London. His brother David, chief executive of THe Economist, a former director of the Milaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA and the Secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, London as well as Chairmain of the Contemporary Art Society wrote Architect for Art: Max Gordon (2011) which includes contributions by the Tate director Nicholas Serota, the Saatchis and Emily Fisher Landau amongst others.
Max Gordon was a Contemporary Art Society Committee Member (1972-7) and its elected buyer in 1974, when he bought 25 works for public museums in the UK and abroad. He was also an art collector whose friends were some of the most influential artists of the 1970s and 80s.
