Theodore Harold Gordon, the eldest of three children, was abandoned by his mother and raised by his paternal grandparents of Lithuanian origin. After the death of his father, a sales representative, he followed his grandparents to New York for his high school years. He began studies at the University of Louisville, which he left to train as an apprentice mason, then traveled across the country to San Francisco, where he met his future wife, Zona Chern.
In 1953, the couple settled down and Gordon began a degree in social welfare. Alongside his office job at the hospital, he developed an intense artistic activity. In 1967, a workshop marked a turning point: his office caricatures evolved into invented portraits, drawn frontally in the manner of identity photographs. He favored the pen, a tool sensitive to his moods and thoughts, and described his drawings as “his only legacy… each face is mine at the moment of execution, an attempt at an infinite self-portrait.”
In 1975, thanks to Roger Cardinal, he came into contact with Jean Dubuffet and Michel Thévoz, and began to gain recognition.