PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM EXPLORES ARSHILE GORKY
HULIQ
lphia-museum-explores-arshile-gorky
Sept 8 2009
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The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major traveling
retrospective celebrating the extraordinary life and work of Arshile
Gorky (American, born Armenia, c.1904-1948), a seminal figure in the
movement towards gestural abstraction that would transform American
art in the years after World War II.
The picture shows The Artist and His Mother, c.1926-36, oil on canvas,
60 x 50 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of
Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father. ©
2008 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The first comprehensive survey of the work of this artist in nearly
three decades, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will premier at the
Museum and present 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper
reflecting the full scope of Gorky’s prolific career. Drawn from
public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe,
this retrospective will reveal the evolution of Gorky’s unique visual
vocabulary and mature style.
It is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will be
accompanied by a major publication, published in association with
Yale University Press. The exhibition will travel to Tate Modern,
London (February 10 – May 3, 2010) and The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles (June 6 – September 20, 2010) following its debut
in Philadelphia.
"Gorky built upon the achievements of the early modern artists he
greatly admired and broke new ground during a remarkable moment to
become an inspiration to a new generation of American painters,"
said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director-elect and CEO of
the Museum. "The exhibition and catalogue will offer a deeply moving
reassessment of the artist’s entire career, including his struggles
and his triumphs–personal as well as artistic–and the powerful
legacy of his work."
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition of its
type since 1981 and the first to benefit from the publication of three
biographies of the artist: Nouritza Matossian’s Black Angel: The Life
of Arshile Gorky (1998), Matthew Spender’s From a High Place: A Life
of Arshile Gorky (1999), and Hayden Herrera’s Arshile Gorky: His Life
and Work (2003), all of which shed new light on the artist’s Armenian
background and his central role in the American avant-garde. This
will be the first major museum exhibition to highlight the artist’s
Armenian heritage and examine the impact of Gorky’s experience of
the Armenian Genocide on his life and work.
The retrospective and its accompanying catalogue have also benefited
from in-depth interviews with the artist’s widow, Agnes "Mougouch"
Gorky Fielding, who has generously supported the project from
the start, through key loans and first-hand accounts of Gorky’s
artistic practice as well as his cultural milieu. Among the works to
be included are such renowned paintings as the two versions of "The
Artist and his Mother," 1926-36 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York) and about 1929-42 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.);
"The Liver is the Cock’s Comb," 1944 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery),
the artist’s largest easel painting; "Water of the Flowery Mill," 1944
(Metropolitan Museum of Art), which demonstrates his deep absorption
in nature-based abstraction; "The Plow and the Song series," 1944-47,
which reflects Gorky’s continuing engagement with memories of his rural
Armenian childhood; "Agony," 1947 (Museum of Modern Art, New York),
Gorky’s haunting late painting, a product of his increasingly tormented
imagination in the late 1940s; and "The Black Monk" ("Last Painting")
(Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), which was left unfinished on
Gorky’s easel at the time of his death in 1948. Some of the works
included in the exhibition have not been on public view before,
among them the wood sculptures, "Haikakan Gutan I, II, and III"
(Armenian Plow I, II and III), of 1944, 1945, and 1947 (collection of
the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), on deposit at
the Calouste Gulbenkiam Foundation, Lisbon), as well as the Museum’s
recently acquired "Woman with a Palette" (1927).
Michael Taylor, the Museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern
Art and curator of the retrospective, stated: "Gorky was a pivotal
figure in modern American Art who has since come to be known as the
quintessential artist’s artist. It is our sincere belief that this
landmark retrospective will secure Gorky’s place alongside Jackson
Pollock and Willem de Kooning as one of the most daring, innovative,
and influential American artists of the 20th century."
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be presented in a generally
chronological sequence. Thematic groupings will represent each phase
of Gorky’s career, which underwent an astonishing metamorphosis as he
assimilated the lessons of earlier masters and movements and utilized
them in the service of his own artistic development. Beginning in
the mid-1920s with Gorky’s earliest experiments with Impressionism
and the structural rigor of the paintings of Paul Cezanne, and
continuing through his prolonged engagement with Cubism in the 1930s,
the exhibition ends with the Surrealist-inspired burst of creativity
that dominated the final decade of Gorky’s life and left us with so
many breathtakingly beautiful paintings and drawings. In the 1940s,
Gorky’s contact with Surrealism informed his breakthrough landscapes
in Virginia and the visionary works made in his spacious, light-filled
studio on Union Square, which he called his "Creation Chamber." Several
galleries in the exhibition will serve as "creation chambers" in their
own right, highlighting the artist’s working process by presenting
Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside the numerous painstaking
studies that informed their making.
Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 400-page catalogue, Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art
in association with Yale University Press. The catalogue will include
essays by a group of noted art historians and curators: Harry Cooper,
Jody Patterson, Robert Storr, Michael Taylor, and Kim Theriault, who
will present new theoretical approaches to the artist’s work. The
essays will build upon new biographical details about the artist’s
Armenian background that have emerged in recent years, while also
exploring Gorky’s creative thinking, his unique experimentation and
extraordinary command of materials, and his imaginative exploration
of various themes. The catalogue will be fully illustrated in
color and include a section devoted to Gorky’s exhibition history,
a bibliography, and a chronology of his life and work.
About Arshile Gorky
Born Vosdanig Adoian around 1904 near Lake Van in an Armenian province
of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky witnessed as a young boy the ethnic cleansing
of his people, the minority Armenians. Turkish troops in 1915 drove
Gorky’s family and thousands of others out of Van on a death march to
the frontier of Caucasian Armenia. Suffering from starvation in 1919,
during a time of severe deprivation for the Armenian refugees, Gorky’s
mother died in his arms. With his sister, Vartoosh, he eventually
arrived in the United States where, claiming to be a cousin of the
Russian writer Maxim Gorky, he changed his name to Arshile Gorky.
Gorky stayed briefly with relatives in Watertown and Boston,
Massachusetts, before settling permanently in New York in 1924,
where he studied at the Grand Central School of Art, later becoming
an art instructor there. Gorky met and became fast friends with many
of the city’s emerging avant-garde artists, including Stuart Davis,
Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith. Among
his students was Mark Rothko.
The noted art critic Harold Rosenberg observed that Gorky, "a lifelong
student, was an intellectual to the roots, he lived in an aura of
words and concepts, almost as much at home in the library as in the
museum or gallery." He was largely self-taught, visiting museums and
galleries and reading voraciously. Gorky became familiar with modern
European art and embarked on a systematic study of its masters and
their methods, from Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, whose landscapes
and still-lifes he emulated masterfully, to Pablo Picasso’s Cubist and
neoclassical works, and the biomorphic abstractions of Joan Miro. Works
by Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Leger informed, respectively,
Gorky’s vast Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series of the early
1930s and the sequence of murals on the theme of aviation that Gorky
created in 1936 for the Administration Building of Newark Airport,
under the aegis of the Public Works of Art Project (later the Works
Progress Administration), through which Gorky and many other American
modernists found employment during the Great Depression.
One of the key themes of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be the
artist’s profound engagement with the Surrealist movement throughout
the 1940s. Gorky’s relationships with members of the Surrealist group
in exile in the United States, including its leader, Andre Breton,
as well as painters Yves Tanguy, Wifredo Lam, and Max Ernst, and
his close friendship with the Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta all
contributed to the development of his singular visual vocabulary,
a highly original form of Surrealist automatism characterized by
biomorphic forms rendered with thinned-out washes of paint. After
his marriage in 1941 to Agnes Magruder, whose parents had a farm in
Virginia, Gorky’s experience of the American landscape would enrich his
artistic vision, and, beginning in 1943, emerges as a central theme
in the lush, evocative paintings for which Gorky is best known. The
rich farmland and bucolic atmosphere of rural Virginia (and later
Sherman, Connecticut) reminded Gorky of his father’s farm near Lake
Van, and inspired him to create freely improvised abstract works that
combined memories of his Armenian childhood with direct observations
from nature. The resulting paintings, such as "Scent of Apricots on
the Fields" (1944) and "The Plow and the Song" series (1944-1947),
are remarkable for their evocative strength, lyrical beauty, and
fecundity of organic forms.
Gorky’s last years were tragic. In January 1946, a fire in his
Connecticut studio destroyed 27 recent paintings. Shortly thereafter,
he underwent a painful operation for rectal cancer, and while
recovering created some of the most powerful, though agonized,
works of his final years, including the haunting "Charred Beloved"
series (1946), which alludes to his lost paintings. In June 1948,
Gorky was involved in a serious car accident that left him with a
broken neck and temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. His young
wife left him shortly afterward to pursue a brief affair with Matta,
Gorky’s friend and mentor. Gorky took his own life on July 21, 1948,
leaving behind an impressive body of work that secured his reputation
as the last of the great Surrealist painters and an important precursor
to Abstract Expressionism.
Gorky and Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s extraordinary collection of modern
art provides a unique context for understanding Gorky’s work, since
it includes many paintings from the A.E. Gallatin Collection, such
as Fernand Leger’s "The City" (1919), Pablo Picasso’s "Self-Portrait"
(1906), Giorgio de Chirico’s "The Fatal Temple" (1914), Andre Masson’s
"Cockfight" (1930), and Joan Miro’s "Dog Barking at the Moon" (1926),
all of which inspired the artist during his formative years. Gorky
often visited the Gallery of Living Art at New York University where
the Gallatin Collection was on view in the 1920s and 1930s, and he
made several paintings that were directly inspired by works by modern
artists that he encountered there.
De Chirico’s painting "The Fatal Temple" (1914) provided the point
of departure for the "Nighttime," "Enigma," and "Nostalgia" series,
which consists of more than 80 drawings and paintings made between
1930 and 1934. Gorky also had his first one-man show at the Mellon
Galleries in Philadelphia in February 1934, and one of his first
patrons was the noted Philadelphia collector Bernard Davis. Bernard
and Irmgard Davis were keen collectors of modern art and assembled a
large collection under the name of La France Art Institute, including
numerous works by Gorky, many of which were later donated to prominent
American museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and
the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gorky and his first wife Marny
George even spent their honeymoon with the Davis family in Frankford, a
neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia, during which time Gorky visited
the Philadelphia Museum of Art (then known as the Pennsylvania Museum
of Art) as well as the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion. The Museum
also owns three major works by Gorky that will be included in the
exhibition: "Abstraction with a Palette" (1930), "Dark Green Painting"
(1948), and the recently acquired "Woman with a Palette" (1927).
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum
of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition will run from October
21, 2009 to January 10, 2010. —