I have a crush on Abstract Expressionist artist Arshile Gorky.
The modern artist who I would have been following around with puppy-dog eyes in the 1930s.
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Happiest Valentine’s Day/Week to all who love and celebrate! Here’s an ode to an art crush I have on painter Arshile Gorky.
Arshile Gorky. I had seen his name often—in art history classes and plastered in biographical books about that era of painting (such as Ninth Street Women). It’s a name that’s hard to forget. The first time I heard it, I thought: “That’s almost Dorky.” And as a self-proclaimed dorky person, I respected that. In the last year, I spotted his name more frequently in books and saw an incredibly moving painting of his during my visit to Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo-turned-museum in Venice.
I quickly became a Gorky Person.
It always seems that people are most attached to artists who have lived and died in tragedy. Gorky’s life story isn’t a sunny one (TLDR: it started with genocide and ended in suicide), but that’s not why he’s attracting attention. His refined work continues to speak for him.
The Arshile Gorky Foundation has a free Catalogue Raisonné of his work, available for researching and viewing online. How fascinating to be able to see his output all in one place!* The first half of the 1920s show more impressionistic work: streetscapes, self-portraits, still lives, and landscapes tinged with realism. We can easily identify what we’re looking at. There’s an abrupt shift in 1927, beginning with Still Life with Guitar. I almost feel as though I’m looking at a Picasso or a Braque, but I hate to jump to those cheap comparisons.
*Of course, I wonder how much was lost in the massive fire at his studio in Connecticut just before his death.
The next few years are filled with either portraits or still life scenes, but it’s clear that the style is evolving. Abstraction is fully present!! I’m surprised to see how many ink and graphite works exist. He’s definitely no stranger to studies and experimentation.
Speaking of experimentation, I loved his quick jump into a puddle of gouache before returning back to oil. It feels as if this period of gouache primed him for loosening up his oil paintings. After these pieces, his work starts to become more opaque.
By 1944, he seems to combine still life with landscape in a way that I’m completely unable to verbalize. It feels like you’re on the table this time—you’re one with the oranges.
The canvases become even more color-soaked until the end of his time with us. I should have the sense that they’re chaotic—because of how much is present on the canvas and in his life at this period in time—but somehow I feel comfort when looking at them. Comfort, maybe because I’m a Gorky Person now?
Peer Reviews:
From Abstract Expressionist painter and art critic Elaine de Kooning in Gorky: Painter of His Own Legend, 1951:
“Gorky proved in his work both his great love and his great knowledge of the various attitudes toward space in Western painting, from Uccello to Picasso.”
“Even his least susceptible friends had to admit there was something fabulous about the man.”
“No matter how he directed his forms, they float upward with an extraordinary buoyancy. Poignantly graceful, Gorky’s gardens at first flutter with a light and witty loquacity, but, in an overpowering flux of successive and simultaneous images, forms change, as you look.”
About the painting above, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection wrote:
“Arshile Gorky spent the greater part of 1944 in Hamilton, Virginia, where he produced a large number of drawings, many of which were conceived as preliminary studies for paintings. This work is preceded by such a study, that sets out its motifs, their ordering within the composition, and the arrangement of color. Gorky’s enthusiastic response to the natural surroundings of rural Virginia infused his work with expressive freedom. Landscape references appear in Untitled; though the white ground is uniform, it is empty at the very top of the canvas, suggesting a slice of sky, while the “earth” below is replete with vegetal shapes and floral colors. A clear gravitational sense is produced by the dripping of paint thinned with turpentine, a technique suggested by Roberto Matta. The techniques and content of Surrealism influenced the development of Gorky’s language of free, organic, vitally curvilinear forms. In his emphasis on the autonomous expressive potential of line, form, and color, Gorky anticipated the concerns of Abstract Expressionism.”
André Breton, the creator of the Surrealism movement:
“Here is an art entirely new. Here is the terminal of a most noble evolution, a most patient and rugged development which has been Gorky’s for the past twenty years.”
Clement Greenberg, highly prolific art critic, wrote about him in The Nation in April 1945:
“We have had to catch up with Gorky and learn taste from him…I now find Gorky a better painter than Ryder, Eakins, Homer, Cole, Allston, Whistler, or any American artist of the past one can mention. . . .The critical issue in Gorky’s case was how much of the value of his work was intrinsic, and how much symptomatic, evidential, educational. He had trouble freeing himself from influences and asserting his own personality. Until a short while ago, he struggled under the influences of Picasso and Miró. That he fell under such influence was ten years ago enough proof of his seriousness and alertness–but that he remained so long under them was disheartening. He became one of those artists who awaken perpetual hope, the fulfillment of which is forever postponed. Because Gorky remained so long a promising painter the suspicion arose that he lacked independence and masculinity of character.”
I’m about to start reading a biography about the painter: From a High Place by Matthew Spender. We’ll see how my art crush progresses!
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With love to Arshile, and to us all!
Kelsey Rose
This article is excellent! Really interesting on Gorki's paintings.
I hadn’t learnt much about Gorky until now! Thanks for excellent content ✨