ARSHILE GORKY — EARLY DRAWINGS
By Andrea K. Scott

The New York Times
November 10, 2006 Friday
Late Edition – Final

In 1932 Arshile Gorky outlined his influences for the art dealer
Julian Levy: "I was with Cezanne and now naturally I am with
Picasso." Mr. Levy replied that he would exhibit the Armenian-born
New York painter "when you are with Gorky."

Mr. Levy would not have been wowed by this modest if instructive
show of 21 drawings, all but one sketched in graphite or ink between
1928 and 1935. This was several years before Mr. Gorky evolved from
a brilliant self-taught student of European Modernism to a rapturous
innovator, whose Surrealism-charged spin on non-objective painting
paved the way for Abstract Expressionism.

Drawing was crucial for Mr. Gorky — he called it "the basis of art"
— and he made thousands of works on paper before his suicide in 1948,
at 44. But those hoping for a coda to the Whitney Museum of American
Art’s dazzling 2004 retrospective of Gorky drawings should adjust
their expectations.

These elegantly framed but mostly rudimentary sketches belonged to
Mr. Gorky’s student and friend Hans Burkhardt, the Swiss painter who
probably salvaged several from piles that his mentor planned to abandon
while relocating his studio from Greenwich Village to Union Square in
1930. (Or so speculates the art historian Melvin P. Lader, in an essay
that accompanied an expanded version of this show in Los Angeles.)

Still lifes predominate. The best, made around 1935, depict tabletop
arrangements of organic forms (recalling Arp and Miro) that resist
recognition, but imply function; one biomorphic blip sports a circle
inscribed with a dash that looks uncannily like the head of a screw.

Some locate their forms against lines that evoke corners, windows and
doors, reminiscent of the interior spaces in the artist’s magnificent
series, also from the early 1930s, "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia."

There is one late work here, an assured pencil-and-crayon study on
poster board from 1945 (the year Mr. Levy finally gave Mr. Gorky a
show). The wiry, graceful composition is anchored in the center by
a seductive slash of orange, a welcome, colorful note in a show of
minor works by a major 20th-century artist.