Geoffrey Edgar Solomon Gorer

Social anthropologist and essayist Geoffrey Gorer (1905−1985) has studied art, literature and societal formations through the prism of psychoanalysis and out-of-body experiences such as the influence of drugs or spiritual trance. 

With the constant theme of death and sex for background, this true polymath explored African dance symbolic, the Marquis de Sade’s ​“revolutionary ideas”, Himalayan cultures, the mores of American and Russian people — he lived in the USA for almost two decades –, modern England as well as Balinese and Angkorian art, visiting Southeast Asia in the 1930s. 

His many interests lead him to long association with English author George Orwell, American anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and various artists of his time, most notably New-Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins. Gorer met Hodgkins in 1929, when he was only 24, and was profundly impacted by her art. In 1940, Geoffrey and his mother Rée Gorer invited Frances Hodgkins to stay in the family’s Somerset cottage.