MOCA SHOWCASES WORK OF PIONEERING ARMENIAN-AMERICAN ARTIST ARSHILE GORKY IN WEST COAST PRESENTATION
By Asbarez
Apr 27th, 2010
The Artist and His Mother, 1926-36, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective
LOS ANGELES-The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA),
presents Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective June 6 through September
20, 2010, at MOCA Grand Avenue. This major traveling retrospective
celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (b.
c.1902, Khorkom, Armenia; d. 1948 Sherman, Connecticut), a seminal
figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American
art in the middle of the 20th century.
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective positions Gorky as a crucial forerunner
of abstract expressionism, and as a passionate and dedicated artist
whose tragic life often informed his groundbreaking and deeply personal
paintings. The first full-scale survey of Gorky’s oeuvre since 1981,
this exhibition includes more than 120 works spanning the artist’s
25-year career.
It features the artist’s most significant paintings, sculptures,
and works on paper, including two masterworks from MOCA’s permanent
collection-Study for The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1943) and Betrothal
I (1947). Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by Michael
Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition was on view October
21, 2009, through January 10, 2010, before traveling to Tate Modern,
London, February 10 through May 3, 2010. MOCA’s presentation, the
third on the exhibition’s tour, is organized by MOCA Chief Curator
Paul Schimmel.
"As the only West Coast venue, MOCA is proud to present the work
of this historically important artist who developed a unique and
deeply influential visual language," commented Schimmel. "Gorky
courageously re-shaped European modernism into the foundations of
abstract expressionism. He inspired a new generation of artists
demonstrating that the act of painting alone was enough to be both
poetically charged and powerfully tragic. His legacy can be seen in
the work of many of the major abstract expressionists represented
in the MOCA’s permanent collection, including Willem de Kooning and
Mark Rothko."
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition of its
type in three decades 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 is 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.); Waterfall (1943, Tate Modern, London); the
Betrothal series, three large-scale works from 1947 reflecting Gorky’s
closer engagement with surrealist ideas and practices-Betrothal 1
(The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), The Betrothal (Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven), and The Betrothal II (Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York)-which are being exhibited together
for the second time at MOCA (the works were first exhibited together
in MOCA’s exhibition Focus Series: Gorky’s Betrothals in 1994); The
Plow and the Song (1947, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College,
Ohio), which demonstrates 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 late1940s; and 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 are the wood
sculptures, Haikakan Gutan I, II, and III (Armenian Plow I, II and III)
(1944, 1945, and 1947, collection of the Diocese of the Armenian Church
of America, on deposit at the Calouste Gulbenkiam Foundation, Lisbon).
Betrothal 1, 1947, oil on paper, 51 x 40 in At MOCA, 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 the structural rigor of
the paintings of Paul Cezanne, and continuing through his prolonged
engagement with cubism in the 1930s, the exhibition ends with a series
of intimate galleries showcasing the abstract 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 that
form the foundation for abstract expressionism. In the early 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 highlight the artist’s working
process by presenting Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside
the numerous painstaking studies that informed their making.
About The Artist
Born Vosdanig Adoian around 1902 near Lake Van in an Armenian province
of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky was a first-hand witness to the Turkish
government’s Armenian Genocide of 1915, which led the artist’s family
and thousands of others to flee.In 1920, Gorky emigrated to the United
States, where, claiming to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim
Gorky, he changed his name to Arshile Gorky. In 1924, Gorky settled
in New York, where he became a largely self-taught artist.
At a time when the American avant-garde privileged originality over
traditional working methods, Gorky was a nonconformist twho developed
his personal vocabulary through a series of intensive apprenticeships
to the styles of other artists. He becamefamiliar 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, andthe 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 theGreat Depression. Gorky became
fast friends with many of New York City’s emerging avant-garde artists,
including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi,
and David Smith. He briefly studied at the Grand Central School of
Art, later becoming an art instructor there. Among his students was
Mark Rothko.
Gorky’s relationships with members of the surrealist group in exile
in the United States during the 1940s-including Andre Breton, Max
Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Yves Tanguy-contributed to the
development of his mature style, a highly original form of surrealist
automatism characterized by biomorphic forms rendered with thinned-out
washes of paint, as in Waterfall (1943) and his 1947 Betrothal series.
After his marriage in 1941 to Agnes "Mougouch" 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-
47), 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 one of the great painters of the 20th century and an important
precursor to abstract expressionism.
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.
Waterfall, 1943, oil on canvas, 60 1/2 x 44 1/2 in.
The international tour is made possible by the Terra Foundation for
American Art. The U.S. tour is supported by The Lincy Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Arts, and by an indemnity from the
Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The exhibition at MOCA is presented by The Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation. Generous support is provided by Lenore S. and Bernard A.
Greenberg; Parx Casino and Racetrack, Philadelphia; Steve Martin;
The MOCA Contemporaries; and the Pasadena Art Alliance. Additional
support is provided by the MOCA Friends of Arshile Gorky: Kip and Mary
Ann Hagopian in honor of Charles E. Young, Mrs. Joseph H. Stein, Jr.,
and Mrs. Louise Danelian.
In-kind media support is provided by Ovation TV, Asbarez Daily
Newspaper/Horizon Armenian TV, YEREVAN Magazine, and Los Angeles
magazine.
Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition is 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
includes essays by a group of noted art historians and curators:
Harry Cooper, Jody Patterson, Robert Storr, Michael R. Taylor,
and Kim Servart Theriault, who present new theoretical approaches
to the artist’s work. The essays 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 is
fully illustrated in color and includes a section devoted to Gorky’s
exhibition history, a bibliography, and a chronology of his life and
work. It is available for $65 at all MOCA Store locations.
Related Events
Members’ Opening SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 7-11pm-MOCA Grand Avenue MOCA
members receive an invitation for two to celebrate the opening of
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective on the West Coast at this legendary
party honoring an Armenian-American artist who produced some of the
most significant paintings of the 20th century. Cash bar and featuring
a special music set and collaboration arranged by Serj Tankian.
INFO 213-621-1794 or [email protected] FREE for MOCA members
Opening Weekend Reception JUNE 2010-MOCA Grand Avenue A special
performance by Armenian-American Interscope recording artist Tamar
Kaprelian will take place as part of the exhibition opening events.
INFO 213-621-1778
Art Talks These informal discussions of current exhibitions
feature artists, curators, critics, writers, and other arts
professionals. Unless otherwise noted, talks take place in the
exhibition galleries, attendance is FREE with museum admission,
and reservations are not required.
INFO 213-621-1745 or [email protected]
Arshile Gorky and Abstract Expressionism: A Contested History SUNDAY,
JUNE 6, 3pm-MOCA Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium In conjunction with
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Michael Taylor, exhibition curator and
The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, explores Gorky’s complex and often misunderstood
relationship with the abstract expressionist movement. The initial
reception of Gorky’s work after his death in 1948 paved the way for
his gradual assimilation into the canon of abstract expressionism as
it was formed in the 1950s by, among others, Clement Greenberg, Harold
Rosenberg, Thomas Hess, Sam Hunter, and Dore Ashton. Gorky’s work was
acclaimed by these critics and art historians as an important precursor
to the largescale abstract paintings of his friends and colleagues,
such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Although
universally accepted at the time, this reading of Gorky’s work has
been contested in recent years, since it deliberately downplays the
artist’s longstanding allegiance to surrealism during his lifetime,
leading to a fundamental misreading of his work and its meaning.
Arshile Gorky: Armenian Refugee and Exile SUNDAY, JUNE 20,
3pm-MOCA Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium On the occasion of the
exhibition Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Richard Hovannisian
will discuss Gorky’s relationship to Van and the history of the
Armenian Genocide. Hovanissian is a professor of Armenian and Near
Eastern history and Armenian Educational Foundation chair in modern
Armenian history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA);
the author or contributing editor of 25 volumes about Armenian or
Armenian and Near Eastern history; and has served as a consultant to
the California State Board of Education, authoring the chapter on the
Armenian Genocide in the State’s Social Studies Model Curriculum on
Human Rights and Genocide.
Screening and Q & A with Atom Egoyan In conjunction with Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective, THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 7pm-Pacific Design Center,
SilverScreen Theater MOCA and the National Association for Armenian
Studies and Research (NAASR) present ARARAT (2002, 115 min.), a film
within a film. Written and directed by Academy-Award® nominated
director Atom Egoyan and starring Arsinee Khanjian, Christopher
Plummer, and Eric Bogosian, this film weaves together tales about
a contemporary Armenian family, artist Arshile Gorky, and a tragic
part of the history of the Armenian people. The screening will be
followed by a Q & A with Egoyan.
Gorky and (American) Surrealism SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 3pm-MOCA Grand
Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium In conjunction with Arshile Gorky:
A Retrospective,artist, writer, and critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
will discuss Gorky, the painter, his work, and its relationship
to surrealism. Gilbert-Rolfe has exhibited his work nationally and
internationally for over 35 years. Recent exhibitions include a 20-year
retrospective (Ulrich Museum, University of Kansas 2006). He is the
author of several critical texts including Beyond Piety: Critical
Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993 and Immanence and Contradiction:
Recent Essays on the Artistic Device. He is chair of the Graduate
Art Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Curator-led Exhibition Walkthrough THURSDAY, JULY 8, 6:30pm-MOCA
Grand Avenue Join Paul Schimmel, MOCA chief curator and exhibition
coordinator, for a walkthrough of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.
The Crisis of Arshile Gorky THURSDAY, SEPT 16, 3pm-MOCA Grand Avenue,
Ahmanson Auditorium Hear Kim Theriault, author of the critical study
Rethinking Arshile Gorky and associate professor of art history,
theory, and criticism at Dominican University, discuss Arshile Gorky,
the Armenian Genocide, and crisis of identity in the artist and
his work. Theriault is one of the first scholars to connect Gorky’s
traumatic past with his abstract work.
Art Talks are made possible by The Times Mirror Foundation Endowment,
Good Works Foundation, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City
of Los Angeles.
Daily Program: Life with Gorky JUNE 6-SEPT 20, daily-MOCA Grand Avenue,
Jean and Lewis Wolff Reading Room Life with Gorky (2010, 19.19 min.) is
an intimate portrait of the artist by his granddaughter Cosima Spender,
featuring interviews with Mougouch Gorky, the artist’s widow. Charting
Gorky’s development as a painter, the film considers the impact of the
artist’s surroundings on his work, from the traumas of his Armenian
childhood to his New York studio and the Virginia landscape. Life
with Gorky is produced by the Arshile Gorky Foundation and Peacock
Pictures for Tate Media and sponsored by Bloomberg.
INFO 213-621-1745 or [email protected] FREE with museum admission;
no reservations required
Course: Memory in the Abstract: Painting and Arshile Gorky SATURDAYS:
JULY 10-AUG 14, 11am-2pm-MOCA Grand Avenue and UCLA Extension
Arshile Gorky’s paintings define him as a crucial founder of abstract
expressionism, and also as a passionate and dedicated artist whose
tragic life often informed his groundbreaking and deeply personal
paintings. His vivid explorations of homeland, family, and memory tell
their stories through color, shape, and a dreamlike abstraction of
the familiar world. In conjunction with the exhibition Arshile Gorky:
A Retrospective, UCLA Extension offers a six-week course that examines
the artist’s work for inspiration. Students will tour the exhibition
at MOCA during the first class. The following five meetings are held
in the studio, where Gorky’s techniques and concepts will be explored
and students will create their own paintings looking at his methods
and style.
Instructor: Portia Hein’s paintings and works on paper have been
featured in exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and
China, including (keep feeling) Fascination (2006) at California State
University, Los Angeles’s Luckman Gallery and Southern Exposure (2005)
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Advance registration required
INFO/REG 310-825-9971 or uclaextension.edu 290 MOCA members, V7861B;
$300 general, reg. # V7861
Sunday Studio These free, artist-led workshops are held on the first
Sunday of every month for all ages.
INFO 213-621-1765 or [email protected] FREE; no reservations required
SUNDAY, AUG 1, 1-3:30pm-MOCA Grand Avenue Drop in with your family and
friends to explore how issues of identity can influence an artist’s
work with visiting artist Shizu Saldamando.
Participate in a spotlight tour of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
with our gallery educators; then, create your own artwork inspired
by the exhibition.
SUNDAY, SEPT 5, 1-3:30pm-MOCA Grand Avenue Spend some time in a
spotlight tour of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective to explore some of
the artist’s painting techniques and processes.
Then, join guest artist Michael Pizzaro for painting with sounds,
a hands-on workshop inspired by the exhibition.
First Sundays are For Families is generously supported by Bank of
America, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los
Angeles County Arts Commission, and the Department of Cultural Affairs,
City of Los Angeles.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)-Celebrating 30
Years as the Nation’s Leading Contemporary Art Museum Founded in 1979,
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members; a world-class permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works
international in scope and among the finest in the nation; hallmark
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that present original scholarship; and groundbreaking monographic,
touring, and thematic exhibitions of international repute that survey
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