Arshile Gorky

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Arshile Gorky

(born April 15, 1904, Khorkom, Van, Turkish Armenia — died July 21, 1948, Sherman, Conn., U.S.) Armenian-born U.S. painter. In 1920 he emigrated from Turkish Armenia to the U.S. In 1925, after study at the Rhode Island School of Design, he settled in New York City, where he studied and then taught at the Grand Central School of Art (1926 – 31). He sought to assimilate the aesthetic visions of Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso by painting in their styles until he encountered the émigré European Surrealists; he then developed his own style of abstraction featuring biomorphic forms that suggest plants or human viscera floating over a background of melting colours. After a series of personal calamities, he hanged himself. He is the most important direct link between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

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Art Encyclopedia: Arshile Gorky

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(b Dzov, Turkish Armenia, 15 April 1904; d Sherman, CT, 21 July 1948). American painter of Armenian birth. One of the most illustrious artists of the post-war New York School, he began his life in possibly the most obscure circumstances of any international modern master. His father emigrated to the USA to avoid conscription into the Turkish Army in World War I; in the Turkish persecution of the Armenians, Gorky's mother died in her son's arms after a 120-mile march. With his sister (who later figured prominently in his paintings) Gorky made his way to the coast and then, by ship, to the USA, arriving at New York in April 1920.

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Biography: Arshile Gorky

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The American painter Arshile Gorky (1905-1948) created a personal language of form dealing with the iconography of the unconscious that enabled him to extend surrealism in the 20th century.

Born in Turkish Armenia, Vosdanig Manoog Adoian changed his name in 1925 to Arshile Gorky, meaning the "bitter one." He emigrated to the United States with his sister at the age of 15. After studying briefly at the Rhode Island School of Design, he moved to Boston in 1923, where he secured part-time work. He continued his studies at the New School of Design, where he was engaged as instructor in 1924. The following year Gorky moved to New York City, where for the next 6 years he was on the faculty of the Grand Central School of Design. In this period Gorky's work drew on a variety of sources, including Camille Corot, J. A. D. Ingres, and Pablo Picasso.

The key work of Gorky's early period is the Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-1929), 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, 1927/1928) and the surrealist-inspired figurative phase of Picasso (Still Life, 1929). This latter interest, in surrealist biomorphic shape, Gorky mastered and extended during the next 2 decades.

Gorky's work during the 1930s was divided between drawing and painting. The rather geometrical Organization Series (1933-1936) 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 make no attempt to create an easy visual experience for the layman.

Toward the end of the 1930s, 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 (ca. 1936) exists in four versions and, like the numerous versions of his Garden in Sochi (1938-1940), 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.

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 (1942). His palette increased in intensity, and great puffs of florescent color seemed to vibrate from The Liver Is the Cock's Comb (1944). But during the same period Gorky could turn to the arabesque line of Ingres and the delicate hues found in his Good Afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln (1944). In the works of the last 2 years of his life, of which Agony (1947) and Betrothal II (1947) are exemplary, Gorky successfully achieved the visual metaphors of felt new experience. He committed suicide on July 21, 1948.

Biography

Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-1936), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Gorky made two versions of The Artist and His Mother, the other is in the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC. The painting has been likened to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness, to Egyptian Funerary art for pose, to Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color..^[1]

Gorky was born in the village of Khorgom, situated on the shores of Lake Van. It is not known exactly when he was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van.

Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in 1920, aged 16, but they never grew close. At age 31, Gorky married. He changed his name to Arshile Gorky, in the process reinventing his identity (he even told people he was a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky). The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period.^[2] His The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a childhood photograph taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother.

In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early 1920s he was influenced by impressionism, although later in the decade he produced works that were more postimpressionist. During this time he was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cézanne. He also accepted a teaching position at the Grand Central School of Art. In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Kremer Schwabacher and developed a life lasting friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer.

“	The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams from the bristles of the artists brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.	”
	— Arshile Gorky ^[3]

Notable paintings from this time include Landscape in the Manner of Cézanne (1927) and Landscape, Staten Island (1927 - 1928). At the close of the 1920s and into the 1930s he experimented with cubism, eventually moving to surrealism. The painting illustrated above, The Artist and His Mother, (ca. 1926-1936) is a memorable, moving and innovative portrait. Gorky made two versions; the other is in the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.. The painting has been likened to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness, to Egyptian Funerary art for pose, to Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color..^[1] Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930-1934) is a series of complex works that characterize this phase of his painting. The canvas below Portrait of Master Bill depicts Gorky's friend, Willem de Kooning. De Kooning said: I met a lot of artists — but then I met Gorky... He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends. It was nice to be foreigners meeting in some new place. ^[4]

Arshile Gorky's Portrait of Master Bill, 1929-1936. Oil on canvas. This painting depicts Gorky's friend, Willem de Kooning who said Gorky "had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends."^[5]

Arshile Gorky, Abstraction with a Palette, c. 1930, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In English translations of letters allegedly written by Gorky in Armenian to his sisters he often described moods of melancholy, and expressed loneliness and emptiness, nostalgia for his country, and bitterly and vividly recalled the circumstances of his mother's death. Most of these translations (especially those expressing nationalistic sentiments or imparting specific meanings to his paintings) are now considered to be fakes produced by Karlen Mooradian (a nephew of Gorky) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, the contents of the fake letters heavily influenced the authors of books written about Gorky and his art during the 1970s and 80s.

Gorky's later years were filled with immense pain and heartbreak. His studio barn burned down, he underwent a colostomy for cancer, his neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident, and his wife of seven years left him, taking their children with her. Gorky hanged himself in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1948, at the age of 44. He is buried in North Cemetery in Sherman, Connecticut.

Even after death, misfortune followed him: a plane crash in 1962 took 95 lives and 15 of his paintings and drawings.[1]

His daughter, the painter Maro Gorky, married Matthew Spender, son of the British writer Sir Stephen Spender.

Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver is the Cock's Comb". "The Betrothal II", and "One Year the Milkweed" immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. When Gorky showed his new work to André Breton in the 1940s, after seeing the new paintings and in particular The Liver is the Cock's Comb, Breton declared the painting to be "one of the most important paintings made in America" and he stated that Gorky is a Surrealist, which was Breton's highest compliment. ^[6] But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many worldwide, including the Tate in London. In October 2009 the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major Arshile Gorky exhibition: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective ^[7]

Gorky in fiction

References

^ ^a ^b Matossian, Nouritza. Black Angel, The Life of Arshile Gorky. Overlook Press, NY 2000, pp.214-215
^ Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide
^ Abstract Expressionism, by Barbara Hess, Taschen, 2005, pg 10
^ Willem de Kooning (1969) by Thomas B. Hess
^ Willem de Kooning (1969) by Thomas B. Hess
^ Matossian, Nouritza. Black Angel, The Life of Arshile Gorky. Overlook Press, NY 2000, pp.352-357
^ Holland Cotter, NyTimes reviewRetrieved October 23, 2009

Vaughn, William (2000). Encyclopedia of Artists. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN 0-19-521572-9.
Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4

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Arshile Gorky Արշիլ Գորկի
Arshile Gorky
Birth name	Vostanik Manoog Adoyan
Born	April 15, 1904(1904-04-15)? Khorgom, Vilayet of Van, Ottoman Empire
Died	July 21, 1948 (aged 44) Sherman, Connecticut, U.S.
Nationality	Armenian
Field	Painting, Drawing
Works	Landscape in the Manner of Cezanne (1927) Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930 - 1934)

Arshile Gorky

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Biography

Gorky in fiction

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