Arshile Gorky, Agony, 1947, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 1⁄2 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, A. Conger Goodyear Fund, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Part 9 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

The vast majority of Gorky’s paintings from the ’30s—and each major painting he made after 1943—were informed by several preliminary studies and highly finished drawings that determined its composition. For later works, the initial sketches were often made in the fields of Virginia or Connecticut. The artist would return to his studio to experiment with the imagery of these initial sketches, which he would develop into drawings or pastels. After completing a highly finished preparatory drawing, Gorky would transfer it to the canvas through a grid system that allowed him to map the entire composition of his new painting. He frequently returned to his earlier sketches, even making new drawings, to solve formal problems he encountered in the act of painting.

This working process can be clearly discerned in the drawings and sketches that Gorky made for his 1947 painting Agony, including an impressive pastel study that is almost identical in size and composition to the finished work. The painting and its studies reveal his anguished state of mind as he continued to battle cancer and depression. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, once described Agony, with its smoldering reds and deep blacks, as “a painting of pulsating ominous beauty.”

Arshile Gorky, Waterfall, 1943, oil on canvas, 60 1/2 x 44 1/2 in., Tate Modern, London, purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Part 7 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

Capitalizing on the experience of drawing in Connecticut and Virginia, Gorky completely transformed his technique. While he had previously worked with a slow accumulation of many layers of paint, he suddenly felt able to include free line and thin veils of diluted pigment, as in Waterfall (1943). This moment of enrichment also reflects Gorky’s closer engagement with surrealist ideas and practices; his treatment of the landscape may be viewed through the renewed interest among surrealists, especially Matta, in automatism—the liberation of the gesture from the restraint of conscious control.

Early in 1944, Gorky met the surrealists’ leader André Breton for the first time, and a friendship quickly developed, drawing him closer to the group. Breton helped to select titles for some of his paintings of this period, using phrases picked from his conversations with the artist. In 1945, Breton enthusiastically endorsed Gorky’s paintings, praising his abstract visual language: “Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life.”

The enthusiasm shown by Breton enabled Gorky to finally secure the support of a dealer, allowing his work to reach a wider audience and his life to become a little less precarious. Though Gorky would not pursue surrealist ideas dogmatically, his breakthrough to a gestural abstraction paved the way for the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and other young colleagues in New York.

Arshile Gorky, One Year in Milkweed, 1944, oil on canvas, 37 1⁄16 x 45 15⁄16 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

During the early ’40s, Gorky began to work in the countryside, initially during a two-week stay in 1942 with the artist Saul Schary in Connecticut. He then spent the summer and autumn of 1943 at Crooked Run Farm, near Lincoln, Virginia, with the family of his new wife, Agnes Magruder. This was Gorky’s first sustained engagement with landscape since his arrival in America more than 20 years earlier, and he began to make improvised drawings in the area surrounding the farm. Works made during this period testify to the liberation that he experienced, as seen in the freer handling of line and flashes of exuberant color among the plant, animal, and bodily forms.

The quick sketches Gorky made in the fields often began with recognizable imagery from the natural world, such as flowers, plants, and insects. He would then expand upon these sketches in highly finished drawings and paintings (many of which were completed in his New York studio during the winter months), in which organic forms are imbued with an explosive erotic energy. In paintings like Water of the Flowery Mill and One Year in Milkweed (both 1944), Gorky emulated the forces of nature by improvising with thinned-out washes of liquid oil paint to create transparent veils of evanescent color.

Arshile Gorky, After Khorkom, 1940–42, oil on canvas, 36 x 47 3⁄4 in., The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Wise, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Part 6 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

During the mid-’30s, Gorky loosened his style; his painting became freer, his surfaces rather more encrusted. Known for the layering of paint in his works, he began to allow glimpses of underlying colors, lending added depth to his compositions. Shifting away from cubism, he developed a more biomorphic style of abstraction influenced by surrealist artists such as Jean Arp and Joan Miró. At the same time, Gorky started to incorporate mysterious place-names in his titles, such as After Khorkom (1940–42). Though it remained unexplained to his contemporaries, Khorkom was the village of his birth and childhood. The Khorkom paintings—whose imagery can be seen to have developed from the earlier Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series—seem to allude to Gorky’s Armenian roots and experiences more than a decade after his emigration.

Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi, 1941, oil on canvas, 44 1⁄4 x 62 1/4 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase Fund and gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wolfgang S. Schwabacher (by exchange), © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The important series of paintings and gouache studies known as the Garden in Sochi works marks Gorky’s transition from the biomorphism of Joan Miró to his own independent painting style after a two-decades-long, self-imposed apprenticeship to a series of modern artists. The brightly colored, free-floating forms of these works memorialize his father’s garden in the Armenian village of Khorkom, near Lake Van, although the deliberately obfuscating title confusingly references the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, in line with Gorky’s efforts to camouflage his background.

The dominant motif of this series is a large boot-shaped form, thought to represent an old-fashioned butter churn used by the artist’s mother, or an Armenian or Turkish slipper. Gorky later described his father’s garden as filled with poplars and apple trees, as well as “incalculable amounts of wild carrots,” and he based these paintings on his childhood memories of this idyllic place as filtered through Miró’s lexicon of abbreviated natural forms. He had recently seen the Catalan artist’s 1941 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which included several early nature-based abstractions, whose joyous fantasy world shared the exuberant impulse and subject matter of Gorky’s Garden in Sochi paintings.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Gorky completed the earliest and largest image in the series upon his return to New York from San Francisco in October 1941. During this trip, the artist had married Agnes Magruder in Virginia City, Nevada. For the first time since his childhood, Gorky experienced the comfort and security of a loving relationship, thus suggesting that the Garden in Sochi theme reflects his great personal happiness at marrying his beautiful, intelligent, and vivacious young wife, whom he affectionately called “Mougouch,” an Armenian term of endearment.

Arshile Gorky, Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, c. 1931, graphite and ink on heavy wove paper, 21 3/8 x 30 1/8 in., private collection, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Part 5 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

Between 1931 and 1934, Gorky made a series of more than 80 drawings and two paintings that he titled Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia. The inspiration for this important body of work came from Giorgio de Chirico’s 1914 painting The Fatal Temple, which was acquired by Albert Eugene Gallatin, the noted artist and collector, in 1927. When Gorky began the Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series, the painting was on view at Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, located in New York University’s main building in Greenwich Village. The gallery was free to the public and offered progressive American artists access to important masterpieces of the European avant-garde. On his frequent visits, Gorky was drawn to de Chirico’s The Fatal Temple, probably because it contains a portrait of the artist’s mother, Gemma de Chirico, and an outlined self-portrait, complete with a dissected brain.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Fatal Temple, 1914, oil on canvas, 13 1/8 x 16 1/8 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1947, ©2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome

De Chirico’s mysterious painting, with its suggestion of the joy and suffering of the mother-and-son relationship, must have resonated with Gorky, who had by this time begun two important works on the theme of the artist and his mother. With its interlocking shapes, shallow cubist-derived space, and compartmentalized imagery, the Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series represents a distinct departure from Gorky’s earlier experiments with the techniques and motifs of Paul Cézanne and other modern masters. While his paintings of the ’20s remained recognizably close to their original sources, the Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series moved farther and farther from de Chirico’s work as it progressed, to the point where the two paintings on the theme can be considered among the most original of Gorky’s early accomplishments.

Part 4 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

Arshile Gorky, Organization, 1933–36, oil on canvas, 49 3⁄4 x 60 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund 1979, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gorky supported himself during the Great Depression by working as a mural painter for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (FAP/WPA), a government relief effort aimed at easing the plight of unemployed artists. He also pursued his own work in his Union Square studio, using money he earned from the FAP to purchase oil paint, canvases, and other supplies. During his free time, Gorky created such important paintings as Organization (1933–36), which represents the high point of his engagement with cubism during the mid-’30s. For his studies for Organization, Gorky found inspiration in the work of Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, and his close friend Stuart Davis, but as he worked and reworked the painting’s thickly encrusted surface over a period of three years, Gorky assimilated these artists’ disparate visions into his own highly original composition.

Gorky’s budding interest in surrealism during the early ’30s eventually encouraged him to move away from the spatial effects of cubism seen in Organization toward a new form of abstraction that incorporated biomorphic shapes derived from the work of Jean Arp and Joan Miró, while also bearing his own unique imprint. Between 1934 and 1936, Gorky would combine organic imagery drawn from the work of these artists with the interlocking geometric shapes of his Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia works to produce his Khorkom series, titled after his cherished hometown on the shores of Lake Van in Turkish Armenia.

Arshile Gorky, Composition, 1936–39, oil on canvas, 29 3⁄4 x 35 3⁄4 in., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Francisca S. Winston Fund, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Other paintings from this period, such as Composition (1936–39), reveal Gorky’s interest in André Masson’s violent surrealist compositions of the ’30s, which feature slaughterhouses, cockfights, and animals devouring each other. Gorky’s interest in Masson helps to explain the presence of similar bird motifs, especially schematically rendered heads and necks, in his own biomorphic paintings of the mid-to-late ’30s, which, despite their seemingly abstract appearance, often suggest combat or struggle.

Part 3 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

Arshile Gorky and his mother, Van, Turkish Armenia, 1912, courtesy of Dr. Bruce Berberian

Two of Gorky’s best-known paintings, both titled The Artist and His Mother, were based on a photograph of the young artist and his mother, Shushanig der Marderosian, taken in 1912 in the Turkish Armenian city of Van. The photograph was sent to Gorky’s father, Setrag Adoian—who had immigrated to the United States four years earlier to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army—and was intended to remind him of the family he left behind.

Persecution of the minority Armenians reached its culmination in 1915, when the Turkish army began systematically slaughtering entire Armenian villages, forcing a quarter million refugees, including Gorky, his mother, and his sister, to leave their homes and travel more than 100 miles to the protected frontier of Russian Armenia. In March 1919, Gorky’s mother starved to death after Turkish blockades severely restricted the food supply to the Armenian refugees, and the following year Gorky and his sister traveled to the United States to reunite with their father. Six years later, while living and working in New York, Gorky began the first of two paintings based on the 1912 photograph, which had great personal significance for him after his mother’s death.

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926–36, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Like many survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Gorky did not discuss his experiences during and after the massacres, but the paintings seem to have provided an outlet for his grief; the resulting canvases are unsurpassed in his oeuvre in their extraordinary emotional intensity. Both versions of the painting underwent substantial revisions in the ’30s and early ’40s, as the artist continually revised, erased, and repainted the compositions, perhaps believing that to finish either work would be to acknowledge that his beloved mother was gone forever.

Part 2 of an ongoing series of excerpts from MOCA’s interpretive materials on Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective.

Following his dialogue with the work of Paul Cézanne during the ’20s, Gorky progressed to a sustained engagement with cubism the following decade. In an essay on the artist Stuart Davis, published in the September 1931 issue of Creative Art, Gorky exclaimed, “Has there been in six centuries better art than Cubism?” By this time, Gorky’s still-life compositions had already begun to incorporate the flattened forms and compressed space found in the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and other modern artists before World War I.

While Gorky’s 1927 painting Woman with a Palette invokes Picasso’s monumental neoclassical figures of the early ’20s, such as those of Three Women at the Spring (1921), its subject matter provides the point of departure for a large sequence of cubist paintings and works on paper. These images reveal Gorky’s systematic immersion in the styles and techniques of European modernism, as well as his growing independence of line and color in representations of actual objects. The format of Woman with a Palette, in which a seated personage holds a painter’s palette in an architectural setting, is translated into a cubist idiom in later works such as Blue Figure in a Chair (c. 1931) and Abstraction with a Palette (c. 1930–31). The palette in these paintings becomes almost as large as the seated figure, and the forms of the composition are flattened to the point where they lie parallel to the picture plane. In the latter canvas, the artist even alludes to his own harlequin-print sweater by including its pattern, suggesting the figure can be read as a surrogate for Gorky in his studio (although this diamond-shaped pattern was also a recurring motif in Picasso’s work).

IMAGES, LEFT: Arshile Gorky, Woman with a Palette, 1927, oil on canvas, 53 1⁄2 x 37 1⁄2 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds (by exchange) from the bequest of Henrietta Myers Miller and with proceeds from the sale of other deaccessioned works of art, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. RIGHT: Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring, 1921, oil on canvas, 80 1⁄4 x 68 1⁄2 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil, 1952, © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo credit: digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York