Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter, an important link between European surrealism and the modern art movement, known as Abstract Expressionism. His vibrantly colored, free-form abstractions anticipated the works of such American abstract expressionists, as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Background
Arshile Gorky was born on April 15, 1904 in Khorgom, Vilayet of Van, Ottoman Empire (present-day Dilkaya, Van Province, Turkey). Gorky's early life was disrupted, when his father abandoned Turkey, his wife and his family in order to avoid service in the Turkish army. The rest of the family soon fled to Armenia to escape Turkish persecution and were subsequently dispersed. In 1920, Gorky emigrated to the United States, where he rejoined his sister in Watertown, Massachusetts, and assumed the pseudonym, by which he became known.
Education
Arshile attended Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. He continued his studies at the New School of Design in Boston from 1922 to 1924.
Gorky moved to New York in 1925, where, for the next 6 years, he worked at the faculty of the Grand Central School of Art. In this period, Gorky's work drew on a variety of sources, including Camille Corot, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pablo Picasso.
The key work of Gorky's early period is the "Artist and His Mother", a double portrait, composed of cool flowing shapes, which evokes a mood of stillness. Although this portrait is reserved in terms of its painterly qualities, relying heavily on the fine flowing line of Ingres, Gorky was simultaneously exploring the colorspace synthesis of Paul Cézanne ("Staten Island") and the surrealist-inspired figurative phase of Picasso ("Still Life"). This latter interest in surrealist biomorphic shape Gorky mastered and extended during the next 2 decades.
Gorky's work during the 1930's was divided between drawing and painting. The rather geometrical "Organization Series" was probably a result of the artist's awareness of the work of Josef Albers. Gorky's "Aviation" mural (a Federal Art Project commission now lost), the theme of which was repeated in the "Aviation" murals for the 1939 New York World's Fair, broke away from the more enclosed forms of the "Organization Series" and exploited photomontage and cubist pictorial space. As public art, Gorky's murals made no attempt to create an easy visual experience for the layman.
It's worth noting, that Gorky's works were exhibited and sold at the Down Town Gallery in New York in 1931.
Toward the end of the 1930's, as Gorky came under the influence of the work of André Masson, his work seemed to depend less on explicit references, verifiable to the spectator, and more on a felt memory, expressed in his developing, vibrant palette. The "Image of Xhorkhom" exists in four versions and, like the numerous versions of his "Garden in Sochi", ostensibly refers by its title to the remembrance of things past. The latter series is a development from the former, with the images grown more delicate and cleaner in shape, the surfaces less densely painted and the legibility of the artist's forms increasingly ambiguous as Gorky achieved a complete metamorphosis of floral and anatomical imagery.
Arshile signed a 3 year deal with the Guild Art gallery in 1935, which was cofounded by Margaret Lefranc and Anna Walinska. The gallery arranged his debut solo exhibition in New York - "Abstract Drawings by Arshile Gorky". Also, the paintings he worked on during this period include "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia", which represents a series of paintings.
Gorky's last years witnessed a further extension of surrealist devices, stimulated by the presence in America of Roberto Matta Echaurren and later by the arrival of the remaining coterie of surrealists, headed by André Breton. Gorky's application of paint achieved a greater freedom, the resulting images, shining through the thin pigment, as in the "Pirate I". His palette increased in intensity, and great puffs of florescent color seemed to vibrate from "The Liver Is the Cock's Comb". But during the same period, the painter could turn to the arabesque line of Ingres and the delicate hues, found in his "Good Afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln". In the works of the last 2 years of his life, of which "Agony" and "Betrothal II" are exemplary, Gorky successfully achieved the visual metaphors of felt new experience.
How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life
One Year the Milkweed
Untitled (Cubist Figure)
Diary of a Seducer
Portrait of a Woman
Soft Night
The Plough and the Song
Waterfall
Self-Portrait
Organization
Portrait of Vartoost
Golden Brown Painting
Portrait of Ahko
Portrait of Azadoohi (Liberty Miller)
The Barber (Composition No. 5)
Waterfall
Mechanics of Flying
Garden in Sochi
Leonora Portnoff
The Betrothal II
Summation
The Leaf of the Artichoke is an Owl
Self-Portrait at the Age of Nine
Tracking Down Guiltless Doves
The Liver is the Cock's Comb
Agony
Portrait of Akabi
Self-Portrait
The Limit
Portrait (Head)
Still Life (Composition No. 7)
Park Street Church
Fireplace in Virginia
Water of the Flowery Mill
Painting
Portrait of a Young Man
Portrait of Myself and My Imaginary Wife
Landscape
Still Life with Skull
Still Life (Red and Yellow)
Image in Khorkom
Moma
Man's Head
Untitled (Abstract Landscape)
Hitler invades Poland
Untitled
The Observer
Good Hope Road
Bound in Sleep
Pears, Peaches and Pitcher
Composition
Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia
Charred Beloved II
Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia
Still Life of Flower
Untitled
Nude
Staten Island
Blue Figure in a Chair
Woman with Necklace Marquette
Child of an Idumean Night (Composition No. 4)
Dark Green Painting
Enigmatic Combat
Portrait of Master Bill
Battle at Sunset with the God of Maize (Composition No. 1)
From a High Place II
The Artist and His Mother
The Artist's Mother
Aviation: Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitations
Views
Quotations:
"The eyes of the Armenians speak long before the lips move and long after they cease to."
"Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he can not see physically with his eyes."
"I do not paint in front of, but from within nature."
"I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes, I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes, I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to - because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting."
Connections
Corinne Michelle West, an artist, was Gorky's muse and probably his lover, although she refused to marry him, when he proposed several times. Arshile married Agnes Magruder, the daughter of Admiral John H. Magruder, in 1941. The couple had two daughters: Maro and Yalda (renamed Natasha some months later).
muse:
Corinne Michelle West
Wife:
Agnes Magruder
Daughter:
Maro Gorky
Daughter:
Natasha Gorky
References
Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years
In this work, Dore Ashton writes a lucid account of Gorky, who tends to resist classification, contributing an art historical overview of the artist's appreciation of such modern innovators of abstraction and Surrealism, as Miro and Kandinsky. Matthew Spender provides biographical details of Gorky's early years, while a selection of Gorky's personal letters further sheds an intimate light on the artist and his achievements.
1995
Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia
This introduction, published to coincide with a major traveling exhibition of the Gorky's work, provides new insight into the tragic life and important career of one of the 20th century's greatest painters.
2010
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
Accompanying the first major retrospective of the artist's work in almost thirty years, this book traces the evolution of Gorky's arresting visual style.
2009
Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943-1947
"Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943-1947" is the first book to explore nature's central role in establishing the singular voice of this truly pioneering figure in abstract expressionism.
2018
Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph, as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more, than three decades of scholarship and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings, this work traces the progress from apprentice to master of André Breton, called "the most important painter in American history".
1985
Arshile Gorky: A Life in Letters and Documents
This massive biography accompanies a major exhibition of the work of Armenian-born painter, Arshile Gorky, who is increasingly considered an important influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism. The book tells his story through many voices: his letters, sent and received; the correspondence of family and friends; pivotal reviews and criticism; newspaper articles and other essential documents.
Arshile Gorky: The Early Years
Melvin P. Lader, leading scholar on the artist's work, establishes new critical ground, expanding upon his extensive research and previous writings on the life and work of Arshile Gorky. With significant new insights and revelations into his early years, Mel Lader's essay and Jack Rutberg's preface bring to greater light a profound artistic relationship between Gorky and artist Hans Burkhardt. All of the works in this book were from Burkhardt's collection, with the majority of these - more than 100 works - having never before been exhibited or reproduced.