ARSHILE GORKY: A
RETROSPECTIVE OF DRAWINGS
Whitney Museum of American
Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
November 20, 2003 - February
15, 2004
By ERIC
GELBER
Arshile Gorky Portrait
of Artist and his Mother 1926-36
graphite on squared paper, 24 x 19 inches
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Alsa Mellon Bruce Fund,
COVER December 4, 2003 issue show The Artist's Mother 1926 or
1936
charcoal on paper, 24-3/4 x 18-1/8 inches
This and all images (c) 2003, Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York
Arshile Gorky made a slow
and painstaking journey through the art of Picasso and Miró during
the 1930s and emerged with his own distinct visual language. Gorky represents
the forgotten art of immersion, of studying art with intensity and purpose
in order to discover a unique style. This made up for his lack of formal
training. He was an apprentice from a distance, studying art in reproductions
and museums and conferring with his peers. He assimilated the free floating
automatist line of Surrealism and the formal concepts of the Cubists.
Picasso's geometrizing of the human figure and reduction of it into
symbolic components had a profound influence on him, as did the zero
gravity depths of Miró's paintings. He took to heart the great
lesson of modernism, the liberation of the imagination through drawing.
Drawing was integral to Gorky's
entire output; we can see by the number of studies in this fantastic
show that he meticulously planned his major compositions. What appear
to be spontaneous forms are repeated in a number of different drawings.
He discovered forms through the spontaneous drawing process known as
automatism, but polished these forms through endless revisions. These
forms call to mind the curves, protuberances, and orifices of the human
body and various natural phenomena. Gorky's abstraction was free from
the mass media detritus that so many modern day abstractionists revel
in. His intense feelings about the natural world and his investigation
of his psyche were offered without irony.
Arshile Gorky Landscape
in Virginia 1944
graphite and crayon on paper, 10-3/4 x 13-1/16 inches
Private Collection
Gorky's line is endlessly
varied and he was a master of erasure. Agitated muscular lines and delicate
meandering lines play off of one another and ghostly erasures become
poetic presences in his drawings. For Gorky, the act of drawing was
a generative process. It was used to depict abstract concepts and was
also an excrescence of the artist's physicality.
There are many similarities
between Gorky's drawings of the 1940s and Kandinsky's Improvisations,
especially in the way Gorky applied color. Many of the patches of color
in these late drawings are free floating, used in a non-descriptive
manner. They are symbols, indicators of psychological states. Gorky's
rich vocabulary of forms and playful, imaginative and assertive line
drawing, represent a triumph of the imagination and memory.
