Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, c. 1943. Oil on canvas 73-¼ x 98 in. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1956. © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, The Black Monk (“Last Painting”), c. 1948, Oil on canvas, 30-¾ x 39-¾ in. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, Dark Green Painting, c. 1948. Oil on canvas, 43-3/4 x 55-1/2 inches. Gift (by exchange) of Mr. and Mrs. Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee and R. Sturgis and Marion B. F. Ingersoll, 1995. © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, Painting, c. 1944. Oil on canvas, 65-3/4 x 70-1.4", Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York). © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, Waterfall, 1943, Tate © Tate, 1537 x 1130 mm.
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904-1948, Self-Portrait, c. 1937. 139.7 x 60.6 cm. Oil on canvas 55 x 23-7/8 in. Private Collection, on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
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Tate Modern
Bankside
+44 20 7887 8888
London
Level 4
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
February 10-May 3, 2010
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. 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.
Tate Modern presents the first major retrospective of Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948) to be seen in Europe for 20 years. The major retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, c.1902-1948), a seminal figure in the movement towards gestural abstraction that would transform American art in the years after World War II. Celebrating one of the most powerful and poetic American artists of his generation, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective• examines the extraordinary contribution of this seminal figure in Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition spans Gorky’s 25 year career and offers the opportunity to see this complex and moving body of work as a whole. It includes more than 120 paintings and works on paper, many of which have not been shown in the UK previously.
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 is 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).
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is presented in a generally chronological sequence. Thematic groupings 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 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.
The show also brings 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 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 includes other key works from this period of radical development demonstrating the balance Gorky found between energy and fine control in his mature work. Highlights 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 Museum of American Art).
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.
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.
The exhibition was conceived by Michael R. Taylor, at Philadelphia Museum of Art and is curated at Tate Modern by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, assisted by Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition comes from Philadelphia Museum of Art (21 October 2009-10 January 2010) and travels to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (June 6-20 September 2010). The exhibition is accompanied by a book by Matthew Gale.
Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), Portrait of the Artist Arshile Gorky, 1940. |
