Houston Press, TX
April 29 2004
Capsule Reviews
A picture of our opinions on local exhibitions
BY JOHN DEVINE, KELLY KLAASMEYER AND KEITH PLOCEK
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Born in Turkish Armenia in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian would grow up to be
Arshile Gorky, one of America’s most important and influential
artists, but he would never forget the land of his birth and the
village of his difficult childhood. This intimate retrospective at
the Menil Collection follows Gorky’s progress from his apprenticeship
to the masters through his cubist exercises to his breakthrough in
the 1940s. Aided by a return to drawing from nature and abetted by
the surrealists, Gorky experienced a creative explosion as he
filtered the world before him through his imagination and memory —
he drew on his agrarian childhood for the sinuous shape at the heart
of the lyrical The Plow and the Song. The vitality and energy of his
drawings make their abrupt cessation (Gorky committed suicide at age
44) all the more poignant. As installed in the Menil, the exhibit has
been judiciously edited down from the ungainly sprawl and visual
overload of the Whitney’s version. Don’t miss the drawings of his
mother, especially the portrait on loan from the Art Institute of
Chicago, or the Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series. Through May
9. 1515 Sul Ross, 713-525-9400.
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