Art Daily
July 6 2003
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings
NEW YORK.- A seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that
ultimately transformed American art, Arshile Gorky (1905-48) will be
celebrated as one of the outstanding draftsmen of the 20th century in
an exhibition opening in November at the Whitney Museum of American
Art. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, on view from
November 20, 2003, through February 15, 2004, will examine the
importance of Gorky’s drawings in his development as an artist and
the evolution of his visual vocabulary and style. It will include 140
drawings, some previously unseen by the public. After its
presentation at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel to The Menil
Collection in Houston.
`Gorky’s intensely powerful drawings are pivotal to an understanding
of his art,’ said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Alice Pratt Brown Director
of the Whitney. `We’ve had a long association with Gorky, beginning
with the purchase of a painting in 1937, the first work of his
acquired by a museum. The Whitney organized a memorial exhibition in
1951, a few years after Gorky’s tragic early death. We’ve done other
Gorky exhibitions as well and are very pleased to present the first
major show devoted exclusively to the artist’s drawings. Gorky’s work
helped to revolutionize American art, and it continues to fascinate.’
The exhibition is being curated by Janie C. Lee, adjunct curator of
drawings at the Whitney Museum, with Melvin P. Lader. Mr. Lader, a
longtime Gorky scholar, is Professor of Art History at George
Washington University.
`Gorky’s drawings are set apart by the graphic elegance and
forcefulness invested in them by the artist,’ said curator Janie C.
Lee. `This technically demanding medium taught Gorky self-discipline
and control, driving his visual inventiveness to new heights.’
Arshile Gorky (Vosdanik Adoian) was born in 1904 or 1905 (there are
differing accounts of the date) in the province of Van in Armenia.
Following the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915, the
scattering of his family, and the death of his young mother from
starvation, Gorky immigrated to the United States in 1920. It was
here that he took the name Arshile Gorky and invented a new life for
himself.
After arriving at Ellis Island, he moved for a brief time to New
England to live with relatives. In 1924 he came to New York and began
to study art. He was quickly made an art instructor and taught for
years in order to survive as an artist. Throughout the late 1920s and
thereafter, Gorky met and became friends with a great many artists,
among them Stuart Davis, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, David Smith,
and Isamu Noguchi.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Gorky’s position within the New York
art scene brought him into contact with some of the Surrealists who
had been forced to flee Europe during the Second World War. His
friendship with the Surrealist poet André Breton, who greatly
believed in Gorky’s work, made a deep impression. Gorky’s friendship
with the Chilean-born artist Matta also contributed to the
development of his mature style. Matta encouraged Gorky to improvise
and experiment more on paper, introducing him to the Surrealist
technique of automatic drawing.
The critic Harold Rosenberg noted 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 and
gallery.” New York City gave Gorky the culture he craved, and the
Surrealists gave him their encouragement and a fluidity of line that
was to carry him toward the achievement of his own personal
abstraction.
Gorky’s artistic development can be defined in part by the
transitions between rural and urban environments that marked the
turning points in his life. Gorky’s experience would greatly alter
and expand in the early 1940s with his exposure to rural America.
This began with his marriage in 1941 to Agnes Magruder, always called
by Gorky (and later by others) Mougouch, an Armenian term of
endearment. The parents of his new wife had a farm in Virginia, and
over the next seven years, Gorky came to spend time in the
countryside there, and later in Connecticut as well. The support of a
wife and family (their first daughter, Maro, was born in l943,
followed by a second, Natasha, in 1945) led to a tremendous increase
in his productivity as an artist.
In the many landscapes Gorky produced in Virginia in the early 1940s,
his abstract vocabulary came to embrace natural and organic forms.
His method was to take home the drawings that he made in the fields
and draw repetitions of them, exploring multiple variations of each
image. These repetitions enabled him to ingest new ideas gained
outdoors until they became an integral part of his formal vocabulary.
Meyer Schapiro, in his introduction to Ethel Schwabacher’s monograph
on Gorky, said that after discerning “the vague, unstable image-space
of the day-dreaming mind,” Gorky detached color from drawn line,
making line and color two different components in the picture.
Gorky’s drawings from this time also gave the artist a chance to
experiment and develop new techniques. He washed them in his bathtub,
hung them up to dry, and later scraped or sanded the surface. In
part, this new experimentation with surfaces was intended to further
alter the recognizable identity of an image through the elimination
of specific botanical or biological details.
The swelling, rounded forms found in the late drawings, which
abruptly collapse into curving and folded planes suggestive of
leaves, petals, or grass, have convinced many commentators that
Gorky’s imagery must have a basis in natural forms. Interpretations
differ as to the source of these forms: some believe Gorky’s
inventions were inspired by plants and insects that he observed
during his walks in the countryside, while others claim that these
images recall genitals or viscera and must have welled up from
Gorky’s subconscious fantasies. Perhaps it is only with the help of
Breton’s theory of Surrealism, with its characterization of nature as
an abstract or symbolic language, that we can begin to understand the
significance of Gorky’s unique style of abstraction.
Gorky at the Whitney Museum
The Whitney has long had an interest in the art of Arshile Gorky, and
began showing his work in the 1930s. In 1951 the Whitney organized
Arshile Gorky Memorial Exhibition, which traveled to the Walker Art
Center and the San Francisco Museum of Art. The museum owns eleven
works by Gorky. The Whitney has also amassed significant archival
holdings of various materials on Gorky’s life and work.
Arshile Gorky: Drawings has been made possible by support from the
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation, Thomas H. Lee and Ann G.
Tenenbaum, Aaron I. Fleischman, and the National Committee of the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Catalogue
The accompanying publication will examine the evolution of the
artist’s visual vocabulary and style through his drawings and will
illuminate his subtle changes in motifs from one version of a theme
to another, and the gradual metamorphosis of a form from identifiable
object or detail to abstract image over periods of time, enhancing
understanding of Gorky’s working method. The book will also explore,
through several of Gorky’s drawings from the 1940s, the artist’s
precise and conscious methodology and differentiate his approach from
the spontaneous and direct execution generally associated with
Abstract Expressionism.
While the majority of Gorky scholarship has tended to present
biographical overviews of his career, the catalogue will focus
specifically on his drawings, thereby providing fresh insights into
this integral component of his work. It will be the first
retrospective catalogue solely devoted to Gorky’s drawings. Essays by
the show’s co-curators, Janie C. Lee and Melvin P. Lader, will frame
the drawings within a comprehensive overview of Gorky’s life,
contemporaries, aesthetic influences, and artistic evolution. The
catalogue will also contain a foreword by Whitney Director Maxwell L.
Anderson.
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