MUSEUM TO PRESENT RETROSPECTIVE EXPLORING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ARSHILE GORKY

Art Daily
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Aug 24 2009

PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major
traveling retrospective celebrating the extraordinary life and work of
Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, c.1904-1948), a seminal figure
in the movement towards gestural abstraction that would transform
American art in the years after World War II. The first comprehensive
survey of the work of this artist in nearly three decades, Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective will premier at the Museum and present 180
paintings, sculptures and works on paper reflecting the full scope
of Gorky’s prolific career. Drawn from public and private collections
throughout the United States and Europe, this retrospective will reveal
the evolution of Gorky’s unique visual vocabulary and mature style. It
is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will be accompanied
by a major publication, published in association with Yale University
Press. The exhibition will travel to Tate Modern, London (February
10 – May 3, 2010) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
(June 6 – September 20, 2010) following its debut in Philadelphia.

"Gorky built upon the achievements of the early modern artists he
greatly admired and broke new ground during a remarkable moment to
become an inspiration to a new generation of American painters,"
said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director-elect and CEO of
the Museum. "The exhibition and catalogue will offer a deeply moving
reassessment of the artist’s entire career, including his struggles
and his triumphs–personal as well as artistic–and the powerful
legacy of his work."

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition of its
type since 1981 and the first to benefit from the publication of three
biographies of the artist: Nouritza Matossian’s Black Angel: The Life
of Arshile Gorky (1998), Matthew Spender’s From a High Place: A Life
of Arshile Gorky (1999), and Hayden Herrera’s Arshile Gorky: His Life
and Work (2003), all of which shed new light on the artist’s Armenian
background and his central role in the American avant-garde. This
will be the first major museum exhibition to highlight the artist’s
Armenian heritage and examine the impact of Gorky’s experience of
the Armenian Genocide on his life and work. The retrospective and its
accompanying catalogue have also benefited from in-depth interviews
with the artist’s widow, Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky Fielding, who has
generously supported the project from the start, through key loans
and first-hand accounts of Gorky’s artistic practice as well as his
cultural milieu. Among the works to be included are such renowned
paintings as the two versions of "The Artist and his Mother," 1926-36
(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and about 1929-42 (National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); "The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,"
1944 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery), the artist’s largest easel painting;
"Water of the Flowery Mill," 1944 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), which
demonstrates his deep absorption in nature-based abstraction; "The
Plow and the Song series," 1944-47, which reflects Gorky’s continuing
engagement with memories of his rural Armenian childhood; "Agony,"
1947 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Gorky’s haunting late painting,
a product of his increasingly tormented imagination in the late 1940s;
and "The Black Monk" ("Last Painting") (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,
Madrid), which was left unfinished on Gorky’s easel at the time of his
death in 1948. Some of the works included in the exhibition have not
been on public view before, among them the wood sculptures, "Haikakan
Gutan I, II, and III" (Armenian Plow I, II and III), of 1944, 1945,
and 1947 (collection of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America
(Eastern), on deposit at the Calouste Gulbenkiam Foundation, Lisbon),
as well as the Museum’s recently acquired "Woman with a Palette"
(1927).

Michael Taylor, the Museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern
Art and curator of the retrospective, stated: "Gorky was a pivotal
figure in modern American Art who has since come to be known as the
quintessential artist’s artist. It is our sincere belief that this
landmark retrospective will secure Gorky’s place alongside Jackson
Pollock and Willem de Kooning as one of the most daring, innovative,
and influential American artists of the 20th century."

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be presented in a generally
chronological sequence. Thematic groupings will represent each phase
of Gorky’s career, which underwent an astonishing metamorphosis as he
assimilated the lessons of earlier masters and movements and utilized
them in the service of his own artistic development. Beginning in
the mid-1920s with Gorky’s earliest experiments with Impressionism
and the structural rigor of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, and
continuing through his prolonged engagement with Cubism in the 1930s,
the exhibition ends with the Surrealist-inspired burst of creativity
that dominated the final decade of Gorky’s life and left us with so
many breathtakingly beautiful paintings and drawings. In the 1940s,
Gorky’s contact with Surrealism informed his breakthrough landscapes
in Virginia and the visionary works made in his spacious, light-filled
studio on Union Square, which he called his "Creation Chamber." Several
galleries in the exhibition will serve as "creation chambers" in their
own right, highlighting the artist’s working process by presenting
Gorky’s most significant paintings alongside the numerous painstaking
studies that informed their making.

Arshile Gorky Born Vosdanig Adoian around 1904 near Lake Van in an
Armenian province of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky witnessed as a young boy
the ethnic cleansing of his people, the minority Armenians. Turkish
troops in 1915 drove Gorky’s family and thousands of others out of
Van on a death march to the frontier of Caucasian Armenia. Suffering
from starvation in 1919, during a time of severe deprivation for the
Armenian refugees, Gorky’s mother died in his arms. With his sister,
Vartoosh, he eventually arrived in the United States where, claiming
to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, he changed his name
to Arshile Gorky.

Gorky stayed briefly with relatives in Watertown and Boston,
Massachusetts, before settling permanently in New York in 1924,
where he studied at the Grand Central School of Art, later becoming
an art instructor there. Gorky met and became fast friends with many
of the city’s emerging avant-garde artists, including Stuart Davis,
Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith. Among
his students was Mark Rothko.

The noted art critic Harold Rosenberg observed that Gorky, "a lifelong
student, was an intellectual to the roots, he lived in an aura of
words and concepts, almost as much at home in the library as in the
museum or gallery." He was largely self-taught, visiting museums and
galleries and reading voraciously. Gorky became familiar with modern
European art and embarked on a systematic study of its masters and
their methods, from Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, whose landscapes
and still-lifes he emulated masterfully, to Pablo Picasso’s Cubist
and neoclassical works, and the biomorphic abstractions of Joan
Miró. Works by Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger informed,
respectively, Gorky’s vast Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series of
the early 1930s and the sequence of murals on the theme of aviation
that Gorky created in 1936 for the Administration Building of Newark
Airport, under the aegis of the Public Works of Art Project (later
the Works Progress Administration), through which Gorky and many
other American modernists found employment during the Great Depression.

One of the key themes of Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective will be the
artist’s profound engagement with the Surrealist movement throughout
the 1940s. Gorky’s relationships with members of the Surrealist group
in exile in the United States, including its leader, André Breton,
as well as painters Yves Tanguy, Wifredo Lam, and Max Ernst, and
his close friendship with the Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta all
contributed to the development of his singular visual vocabulary,
a highly original form of Surrealist automatism characterized by
biomorphic forms rendered with thinned-out washes of paint. After
his marriage in 1941 to Agnes Magruder, whose parents had a farm in
Virginia, Gorky’s experience of the American landscape would enrich his
artistic vision, and, beginning in 1943, emerges as a central theme
in the lush, evocative paintings for which Gorky is best known. The
rich farmland and bucolic atmosphere of rural Virginia (and later
Sherman, Connecticut) reminded Gorky of his father’s farm near Lake
Van, and inspired him to create freely improvised abstract works that
combined memories of his Armenian childhood with direct observations
from nature. The resulting paintings, such as "Scent of Apricots on
the Fields" (1944) and "The Plow and the Song" series (1944-1947),
are remarkable for their evocative strength, lyrical beauty, and
fecundity of organic forms.

Gorky’s last years were tragic. In January 1946, a fire in his
Connecticut studio destroyed 27 recent paintings. Shortly thereafter,
he underwent a painful operation for rectal cancer, and while
recovering created some of the most powerful, though agonized,
works of his final years, including the haunting "Charred Beloved"
series (1946), which alludes to his lost paintings. In June 1948,
Gorky was involved in a serious car accident that left him with a
broken neck and temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. His young
wife left him shortly afterward to pursue a brief affair with Matta,
Gorky’s friend and mentor. Gorky took his own life on July 21, 1948,
leaving behind an impressive body of work that secured his reputation
as the last of the great Surrealist painters and an important precursor
to Abstract Expressionism.

Gorky and Philadelphia The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s extraordinary
collection of modern art provides a unique context for understanding
Gorky’s work, since it includes many paintings from the A.E. Gallatin
Collection, such as Fernand Léger’s "The City" (1919), Pablo Picasso’s
"Self-Portrait" (1906), Giorgio de Chirico’s "The Fatal Temple"
(1914), André Masson’s "Cockfight" (1930), and Joan Miró’s "Dog
Barking at the Moon" (1926), all of which inspired the artist during
his formative years. Gorky often visited the Gallery of Living Art at
New York University where the Gallatin Collection was on view in the
1920s and 1930s, and he made several paintings that were directly
inspired by works by modern artists that he encountered there. De
Chirico’s painting "The Fatal Temple" (1914) provided the point of
departure for the "Nighttime," "Enigma," and "Nostalgia" series, which
consists of more than 80 drawings and paintings made between 1930 and
1934. Gorky also had his first one-man show at the Mellon Galleries
in Philadelphia in February 1934, and one of his first patrons was the
noted Philadelphia collector Bernard Davis. Bernard and Irmgard Davis
were keen collectors of modern art and assembled a large collection
under the name of La France Art Institute, including numerous works by
Gorky, many of which were later donated to prominent American museums,
including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Gorky and his first wife Marny George even spent
their honeymoon with the Davis family in Frankford, a neighborhood
in northeast Philadelphia, during which time Gorky visited the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (then known as the Pennsylvania Museum of
Art) as well as the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion. The Museum
also owns three major works by Gorky that will be included in the
exhibition: "Abstraction with a Palette" (1930), "Dark Green Painting"
(1948), and the recently acquired "Woman with a Palette" (1927).

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum
of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.