Arshile Gorky
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ARSHILE GORKY (Vostanik Manoog Adoyan) was born in a village on Lake Van in Turkey, probably in 1904. His native country, wild and mountainous, and the songs and dances of the Armenian people left life-long impressions on his mind and art. During the first World War his family lost everything and his mother died; and in 1920 he came to America. Contending with poverty all his life, he was mostly self-taught. Gorky was an impassioned student of the masters, past and present, haunted the New York galleries and museums, and early became an adherent of advanced art. His evolution showed the successful influences of Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Chirico, Kandinsky and Miro. But he was far from an uncreative imitator; he learned the language of modern art as a musician learns by composing variations on themes by other composers. His own artistic nature was so deeply sensual, so much in love with pigment and color, that everything he did was himself.
After an early representational phase, as in the retrospective portrait of himself as a child with his mother, he embarked about 1930 on abstract experiments, at first cubistic, then in free non-geometrical forms with a growing surrealist content. By his middle thirties he had assimilated external influences and was expressing himself in terms more and more individual--a development aided by a return to direct contact with nature. Gorky was essentially a lyrical artist, and much of his imagery was based on landscape motifs. Working outdoors in the summer of 1943 he produced scores of colored drawings of leaf and flower forms--studies which contained the germs of his later paintings. Natural objects, already somewhat abstracted in the drawings, were still further abstracted in the paintings--translated into forms existing in their own right but retaining the character of their prototypes in nature. From this time Gorky's art flowered into a highly personal kind of surrealist abstraction, in which images from nature, memory and the unconscious mind were transformed into visual symbols and embodied in semi-abstract patterns. His style was marked by richly sensuous substance, luxuriant color, and a freedom of touch that was akin to automatic writing. But Gorky was always a draftsman, both precise and powerful, and his seeming improvisation was actually the result of planned design, as proved by numerous studies and successive versions.
In a series of large paintings finished in his last year Gorky attained his greatest plastic inventiveness. In them he expressed fully the passionate poetry of his nature. They are landscapes of the unconscious mind, sometimes conveying sensual delight in earth and heat, sometimes embodying in their imagery the mystery and drama of sex, sometimes pervaded by a brooding sense of tragedy. Their depth of emotion, their richness of symbolism and their maturity of style prove that he was growing year by year. In certain paintings the tragic sense that had always been latent in his work reached a climax of intensity--a climax that presaged his death by suicide when he was only forty-three. A pioneer of the second wave of abstract art, Gorky had a strong influence on the abstract expressionist movement which has dominated the last decade.
Gorky: The twentieth century--what intensity, what activity, what restless nervous energy! Has there in six centuries been better art than Cubism? No. Centuries will go past--artists of gigantic stature will draw positive elements from Cubism.
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