US POSTAL SERVICE TO UNVEIL A STAMP FEATURING ARSHILE GORKY’S "THE LIVER IN A COCK’S COMB"

PanARMENIAN.Net
15.01.2010 15:02 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky’s 1944
painting "The Liver in a Cock’s Comb," will be the first of a series
of stamps being unveiled on March 11 by the US Postal Service honoring
abstract expressionists.

With this stamp pane, the U.S. Postal Service honors the artistic
innovations and achievements of 10 abstract expressionists, a group
of artists who revolutionized art during the 1940s and 1950s and
moved the U.S. to the forefront of the international art scene for
the first time.

Other artists in the pane include Willem de Kooning and Jackson
Pollock, both collaborators of Gorky at the height of the abstract
expressionist movement.

Abstract expressionism refers to a large body of work that comprised
radically different styles, from still, luminescent fields of color
to vigorous, almost violent, slashes of paint. In celebration of the
abstract expressionist artists of the 20th century, art director Ethel
Kessler and noted art historian Jonathan Fineberg (Gutgsell Professor
of Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) selected
ten paintings to feature on this colorful pane of self-adhesive
stamps. Kessler used elements from Barnett Newman’s Achilles (1952)
to frame the stamps. The arrangement of the stamps suggests paintings
hanging on a gallery wall. For design purposes the sizes of the stamps
are not in relative proportion to the paintings.

A comprehensive exhibit of Gorky’s work just completed in
Philadelphia. The exhibit moves to the London Tate Modern Museum in
February and will begin a run in June at Museum of Contemporary Arts
in Los Angeles in June.

Arshile Gorky (born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan, April 15, 1904? – July 21,
1948) was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence
on Abstract Expressionism. Gorky was born in the village of Khorgom,
situated on the shores of Lake Van. It is not known exactly when he
was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky
was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to
year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft,
leaving his family behind in the town of Van.

Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with
his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In
the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky’s mother died of starvation in
Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived
in America in 1920. The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky,
a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to
have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period. His The
Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a childhood photograph
taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother.

In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston,
eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early 1920s
he was influenced by impressionism, although later in the decade he
produced works that were more postimpressionist. During this time he
was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cezanne. He also
accepted a teaching position at the Grand Central School of Art.

Gorky’s contributions to American and world art are difficult to
overestimate. The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver
in the Cock’s Comb". "The Betrothal II", and "One Year the Milkweed"
immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the
New York School have acknowledged Gorky’s considerable influence. But
his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing
Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of
Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and
drawings hang in every major American museum including the National
Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky
Archive), and in many worldwide, including the Tate in London. In
October 2009 the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major Arshile
Gorky exhibition.