Arshile Gorky Exhibit at London’s Tate Museum Next Month

Tert.am
14:33 – 30.01.10

>From February 10 to May 3, 2010, there will be a retrospective exhibit
on the life and work of well-known and revered Armenian-American
artist Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948) at London’s Tate Museum, organized
with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles.

According to an official press release from the museum: `Along with
Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, Gorky was one of the most powerful
American painters of the twentieth century, and a seminal figure in
the formation of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition includes
paintings and drawings from across his career, and a handful of rarely
seen sculptures.’

Gorky was born Vostanig Manuk Adoian in an Armenian village in eastern
Turkey. As reported by Times Online, on arriving in New York in the
early 1920s, Gorky let it be understood that he was Russian, a cousin
of the writer Maxim Gorky, and that he had studied under Kandinsky in
Paris.

He never discussed the fact that he was present during the siege of
Van in the early stages of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. After Gorky
and his sister Vartush made their way to America, Gorky set about
turning himself into an artist, educating himself piecemeal at various
institutions in New York and Boston while taking menial jobs. He used
the pseudonym Arshile Gorky for the first time in 1924.