ARSHILE GORKY’S DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS EXHIBITION AT THE WHISTLER HOUSE MUSEUM OF ART

AZG DAILY
17-09-2009

Culture

This fall, the Whistler House Museum of Art will premiere a special
exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist, Arshile Gorky (1904
– 1948), known to be the Father of American Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibit, entitled Drawings and Paintings by Arshile Gorky –
Mina Boehm Metzger Collection, is named after a friend, patron and
student of Gorky’s. It presents 28 never-before-seen and rarely
seen works of art and will be exhibited in the museum’s Parker
Gallery. The collection is significant in that it presents many
of Gorky’s earlier works and traces his progression as an artist,
featuring the influence of such well-respected painters such as Paul
Cezanne, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. Included in this collection,
which is made up of drawings and paintings, is the only surviving
stone sculpture executed by the artist.

As part of its permanent collection, the Whistler House Museum of
Art owns one of Gorky’s few remaining works of the time, Park Street
Church, Boston (1924), which was painted in a Post-Impressionistic
style and has been exhibited at many museums, including the Smithsonian
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

An Armenian immigrant, Vosdanig Monoog Adoian, (better known as
Arshile Gorky) was born in the village of Khorkom on Lake Van, in
the Van Province of Armenia, on April 15, 1904. As a child, Gorky
survived the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks.

While escaping to Russian-controlled Armenia, his family of three
sisters and his parents were displaced and dispersed. Leaving his
family behind, his father escaped the Turkish military draft by moving
to the United States and settling in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1919, during a forced march in Yerevan, his mother died of
starvation in Gorky’s arms. (Her memory inspired a series of
portraits.) In 1920, at the age of sixteen, leaving behind the
war-ridden territory of the collapsed Russian empire, Gorky arrived at
Ellis Island and then joined his father. He spent his early years in
the United States in Providence, Rhode Island, Boston and Watertown,
Massachusetts.

Prior to immigrating to the United States, Arshile Gorky was mainly a
self-taught artist. Passionate about his Armenian heritage and love
of art of the past, its shades were dominantly present in his work
throughout his lifetime. In Boston, he enrolled in the New School
of Design, which he attended from 1922 to 1924. During this period,
Gorky was heavily influenced by the French Post-Impressionist painter,
Paul Cezanne, who paved the way to Cubism. On moving to New York,
sometime in 1925, he began to follow the contemporary artistic style of
Pablo Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism and the innovative style of Spanish
Surrealist painter, Joan Miro.

While in New York, Gorky began an artistic and personal friendship
with such artists as Stuart Davis, John Graham and Willem de Kooning.

He attended both the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central
School of Art, where he also taught until 1931. It was at this time
that he changed his name from Vosdanig Adoian to Arshile Gorky,
claiming to be a relative of the prominent Soviet writer Maxim Gorky,
who enjoyed considerable fame in the West. Seeking to make a name for
himself in the art world, he felt justified in taking on a pseudonym,
as did many of his colleagues of the time. He was determined to
eventually reveal himself as an Armenian.

Gorky’s body of work is a unique combination of Surrealist, Cubist,
and Expressionistic artistic styles, mastering each of the highly
diverse styles with equal ease. By the 1940s he was known as a
surrealist painter and is considered to be the important bridge and
direct link between European Surrealists and US Abstract Surrealists.

Gorky was one of the major forces behind the emergence of the Abstract
Expressionist movement. It was a movement of artistic styles, during
the mid 1940’s, that involved complete freedom from all traditional
aesthetic and social values. It combined abstract form and favored
spontaneous, liberated personal expression.

It is said to be America’s most important contribution to
Modernism. Gorky’s work greatly influenced famous Abstract
Expressionist such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko,
and Willem De Kooning.

The Mina Boehm Metzger Collection contains works that span his artistic
career, showcasing Arshile Gorky as a seminal figure in the movement
toward abstraction that ultimately transformed American art as we
know it today. Along with museums all over the world, including the
Tate Modern in London, his works can be found in most major American
museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern
Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Solomon R.Guggenheim
Museum in New York City.

Gorky was an enigmatic and intense character, but a man of great
poetic spirit. Although achieving personal success and fame, his
final years were full of melancholy, loneliness, and a yearning
for his homeland of Armenia. At the height of his creative success,
he experienced cancer, a failed marriage, a broken neck due to a car
accident and a fire, which destroyed many of his new works. In 1948,
at the age of 44, he committed suicide.

Mina Boehm Metzger, for whom the collection was named, was born in
1877 in Vienna, Austria, "under the American flag". Her father was an
inventor who in his youth had explored the American west with Buffalo
Bill. Later he became a noted architect in New York City where he
headed up his own firm.

In 1898, she married David Metzger, a young, successful New York
business man, and the following year had twin daughters. For many
years she led a busy life often accompanying her husband on business
trips to Europe where she had the opportunity to visit many museums.

This was the beginning of the stimulating age of Impressionism. These
experiences left a lasting impression on her artistic spirit.

Although she studied art as part of her early education, she did not
have any formal training until the 1930s. In New York City, where
Mina Boehm Metzger lived, the Grand Central Art School offered a
class in beginning painting in which she enrolled. It was there that
she met Arshile Gorky, the teacher. She was not only his student,
but one of the first to recognize his genius. She and her husband
became his patrons at a time when the aftermath of depression made
life almost impossible for young artists.

Metzger, along with her daughter, Margaret Vandercook, a sculptor,
and Gorky had adjoining studios in Union Square in New York City. All
three were part of the exciting art revival in New York at that time.

The collection contains several important images of Metzger in the
form of drawings.

In October 2009, The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a
major retrospective exhibition on Gorky, entitled Arshile Gorky:
A Retrospective . It will open in Philadelphia and travel to Los
Angeles and London. It will be the first full-scale survey of Gorky’s
work since the retrospective held at the Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1981. This occasion will introduce
Gorky’s work to a new generation of viewers, and for the artist’s
longtime admirers, will celebrate his singular importance within the
history of art. The Whistler House Museum’s Park Street Church, Boston
(1924) will be a part of the important traveling exhibition.

The Whistler House Museum of Art, located in Lowell, Massachusetts,
is the historic birthplace of the famous American artist, James
McNeill Whistler. Established in 1878, as the Lowell Art Association
Inc., it is the oldest incorporated art association in the United
States. It is known internationally for its distinguished collection
of 19th and early 20th century New England representational art. The
Whistler House hosts many exhibits, lectures, educational programs,
concerts and an array of social events.