From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 (pronounced /ˌɑrʃiːl ˈɡɔrkiː/, born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan; Armenian: Արշիլ Գորկի, Վոստանիկ Մանուկ Ադոյան), (April 15, 1904? – July 21, 1948) was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism.

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. In 1925 he was asked by Edmund Greacen of the Grand Central Art Galleries to teach at the Grand Central School of Art; Gorky accepted and remained with them until 1931^[3]. In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Kremer Schwabacher and developed a lifelong friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer.

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. ^[5]

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."^[6]

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.^[7] 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 June 2005, the family of the artist established the Arshile Gorky Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation formed to further the public’s appreciation and understanding of the life and artistic achievements of Arshile Gorky. The Foundation is actively working on a catalogue raisonné of the artist's entire body of work. In October 2009, the Foundation relaunched its website to provide accurate information on the artist, including a biography, bibliography, exhibition history, and list of archival sources.^[8]

In October 2009 the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major Arshile Gorky exhibition: Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective ^[9]

Gorky in fiction

Gorky appears in Atom Egoyan's movie Ararat as a child in Van and later as an adult survivor of the Armenian Genocide living in New York.

Gorky appears as a character in Charles L. Mee's play about Joseph Cornell, Hotel Cassiopeia and is briefly mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Bluebeard.

Stephen Watts's poem 'The Verb "To Be"' (Gramsci & Caruso, Periplum 2003) is dedicated to Gorky's memory.

References

• 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

Further reading

• Matossian, Nouritza. Black Angel, The Life of Arshile Gorky. Overlook Press, NY 2001

• Goats on the Roof, Arshile Gorky: A Life in Letters and Documents. Ed. Matthew Spender. Ridinghouse, London 2009

External links

• Artcyclopedia
• Artnet - Arshile Gorky Art Images
• Arshile Gorky Biography: Hollis Taggart Galleries
• Whistler House Museum of Art, Lowell, MA – Drawings & Paintings by Arshile Gorky: Mina Boehm Metzger Collection
• The Arshile Gorky Foundation – The official website for information on the artist

From Wikiquote

Vostanik Manoog Adoyan, (better known as Arshile Gorky) (April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948) was an American abstract expressionist painter of Armenian descent, living and working in New York, where he was later strongly involved with American Surrealism. He was a very close friend of Willem de Kooning who respected him as a teacher in painting.

Sourced

• I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso
  • Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28, as quoted in Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p. 31

• I am an individual Gorky – and it is my individual feeling which counts for the most. Why? I do not know nor do I wish to know. I accept it as a fact, which does not need explanation.
  • unpublished letter, as quoted in “Astract Expressionist Painting in America’’, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 133

• I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water.. ..I like the wheatfields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all. (1942):
  • Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28, as quoted in Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 31

• When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it’s something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.(1947)
  • Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

• ..poor art for poor people (critic on social realism art)
  • Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts 1983, p. 6

• You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.
  • Gorky Memorial, Schwabacher, p. 12; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts 1983, p. 15

• (Stuart Davis).. .. is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.. .. two-dimensional surface plane. (1931)
  • Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Creative Art 9, September 1931, p. 213

• Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.
  • unpublished letter, as quoted in Astract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 64

• About a hundred and ninety-four feet away from our house (in Armenia, fh) on the road to the spring, my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots, and porcupines had made their nests. There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of Paolo Ucello’s painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking out their soft breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above this all stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold, and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don’t know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through many years of the same ac, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h—h-sh—h of silver leaves of the poplars.
  • Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 22,23, as quoted in Astract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 124

Unsourced

• The stuff of thought is the seed of artists. Dreams from the bristles of the artist's brush.

• I communicate my innermost perceptions through art.. ..my world view.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Arshile Gorky