EARLY GORKY WORKS & CATALOGUE BREAK NEW GROUND
“ARSHILE GORKY: THE EARLY YEARS” EXTENDED THROUGH FEB. 2005
Also on View: Jerome Witkin: Site & Insight Part 2
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts
357 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90036-2517
Tel (323) 938-5222
Fax (323) 938-0577
E-mail: [email protected]
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PRESS RELEASE
LOS ANGELES, CA – Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) is widely regarded as one of
the most pivotal and significant artists in the development of 20th
century American art. After moving to America from Armenia in 1920, he
quickly became a lightning rod for other artists in the late 1920s and
early 30s, sparking the genesis what was to become the “New York
School”and setting the course of modern art in America.
Now, in a ground-breaking exhibition entitled Arshile Gorky – The Early
Years, and with a 96-page catalogue of the same name, Jack Rutberg Fine
Arts in Los Angeles is showing 66 rare works by Gorky from a private
collection, most previously unexhibited. This exhibition is thought to
be the largest exhibit of Gorky’s works ever presented outside of a
museum, and breaks new ground in addressing Gorky’s earliest stylistic
development.
“Arshile Gorky -The Early Years” offers new references and insights into
this legendary artist during his seminal period as he explored the avant
garde sensibilities of the time. As Melvin P. Lader (widely regarded as
the eminent scholar on the work of Arshile Gorky and author of numerous
books on Gorky and abstract expressionism) notes in this exhibition
catalogue’s text: “As a group, the drawings and paintings mirror Gorky’s
stylistic evolution, up to the point in the late 1930s when he began to
truly digest and synthesize so many of his early influences on the verge
of finding his own unique language and style. Examples of his absorption
of Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, and aspects of Surrealism are
plentiful among these works . . . and they offer us the rare opportunity
to view a good number . . . from a very fertile period of his artistic
career.”
As Donald Kuspit notes in his 1998 essay Arshile Gorky in the Thirties:
“Gorky began his `self-analysis’ in the drawings and painting of the
thirties . . . already beginning to move beyond [modernist elders] ideas
. . .in the thirties still lifes [which are] surrealized and
abstractified versions of Cezanne’s still lifes.” Indeed, Kuspit says
“we see the beginning of this pure, autonomous, highly fluid,
unpredictable line . . . which begins in nature and ends in pure
expression – as abstract expression.”
That this exhibition was even possible is due to the long-standing
friendship between Gorky and the Swiss-born American artist Hans
Burkhardt (1904-1994), who shared a studio with Gorky in New York for
many years, and acquired a formidable collection of Gorky’s early works.
As Lader observes: “Among them were Gorky’s small Cezannean landscape
Staten Island and an equally significant early Self Portrait, both of
which are key pieces in understanding Gorky’s early absorption of modern
influences” and the “Burkhardt collection Gorky drawings provides a
rather unique opportunity to see the artist’s art and ideas evolve
within an important period of his artistic transformation. Drawings, by
their very nature, register the artist’s first impulses in creating a
work. As such, they can often be of enormous value in understanding how
an artist thinks and in tracing the various stages through which his art
has progressed.”
“Arshile Gorky: The Early Years” is currently exhibited at Jack Rutberg
Fine Arts gallery, 357 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, through
February, 2005.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 96-page text with 103 color
illustrations; essay by Dr. Lader, who co-curated the recent major
retrospective of Gorky drawings at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York
and the Menil Collection in Houston.
Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and
Saturdays from 10:00 to 5:00 pm or by appointment.
A portfolio sampling of Arshile Gorky’s exhibition may be viewed at the
gallery’s Web site,