TATE MODERN ANNOUNCES "ARSHILE GORKY: A RETROSPECTIVE"

Art Daily
Dec 4 2009

LONDON.- Tate Modern will present the first major retrospective of
Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948) to be seen in Europe for twenty years.

Celebrating one of the most powerful and poetic American artists
of his generation, "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" will examine
the extraordinary contribution of this seminal figure in Abstract
Expressionism. The exhibition will span Gorky’s 25 year career and
offer the opportunity to see this complex and moving body of work as
a whole. It will include more than 150 paintings and works on paper,
many of which have not been shown in public previously.

With little formal academic training, Arshile Gorky absorbed European
Modernism through both his studies and teaching and went on to become
a pivotal figure in mid-century American art. In New York in 1941,
Gorky encountered the exiled European Surrealists, whose leader,
André Breton, welcomed him as part of their movement. His lyrical
abstractions anticipated Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in
1940s New York amongst a circle of artists who valued spontaneity of
expression and individuality, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning and Mark Rothko. Gorky’s assimilation of European and American
influences resulted in a distinctive synthesis of artistic cultures.

Paralleling the Surrealists’ idea of automatism – the free flowing
release of the hand from conscious control of the mind – he forged
an entirely new type of abstract painting.

Structured around a number of significant moments in Gorky’s oeuvre
and arranged broadly chronologically, the exhibition will reveal
the evolution of Gorky’s visual vocabulary. It will reassess work
from 1920s and 1930s throwing light on the significance of early
developments in his practice. Highlights will include the remarkable
pair of paintings The Artist and his Mother (circa 1926-36, Whitney
Museum of American Art, and 1929-42, National Gallery of Art,
Washington) which act as memorials to Gorky’s lost childhood and
confrontations with exile.

The show will also bring together many of the renowned works from
Gorky’s artistic breakthrough in the 1940s. After his marriage in 1941,
Gorky spent much of his time in the countryside. His experience of
the American landscape, combined with memories of his father’s farm
near Lake Van, inspired lyrical works of nature-based abstraction.

Examples of this period will include Waterfall 1943 (Tate), one
of Gorky’s most luscious abstractions from the landscape where
biomorphic forms, rendered with thinned-out washes of paint, create
veils of colour marked with gestures. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
will include other key works from this period of radical development
demonstrating the balance Gorky found between energy and fine control
in his mature work. Highlights will include Landscape Table, circa 1945
(Centre Pompidou) and the three paintings of The Betrothal series 1947
(Yale University Art Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, and Whitney).

Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian in Western Armenia, probably in
1904, and fled the massacres of 1915. Arriving in America in 1920,
he reinvented himself as Arshile Gorky. He became friends with many
of the city’s emerging avant-garde artists, including Stuart Davis,
Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith. He
studied at the Grand Central School of Art, later becoming an art
instructor there at the age of 22.

The exhibition was conceived by Michael R. Taylor, at Philadelphia
Museum of Art and is curated at Tate Modern by Matthew Gale. The
exhibition comes from Philadelphia Museum of Art (21 October 2009 –
10 January 2010) and will travel to The Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles (June 6 – 20 September 2010).