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拍品專文
"At times, someone appears who sees all. Gorky was one of these" - Dorothea Tanning (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 48).
This highly sophisticated master drawing by Arshile Gorky perfectly encapsulates why the artist is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century art. Displaying elements of Surrealism and the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism, this beguiling work connects two of the most important artistic traditions of the period. From the clandestine figures that populate the center of the composition to the more expressive gestural marks around the edges, the present work also displays the complete range of Gorky’s considerable graphic arsenal. The present work was included in the definitive 1981 exhibition: Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948, A Retrospective, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and having been in the same private family collection for nearly 50 years, Untitled offers a rare opportunity to acquire one of Gorky’s most accomplished works on paper.
Filling the entirety of the sheet, Gorky choreographs a range of evocative forms and gestures into a progression of figures set within a scene redolent of a landscape. Some of these personnages are rendered as complex twisting and torquing fields of color, while others—such as the spectral form on the extreme right—are conjured up from the merest flourishes of Gorky’s pencil. Interspersed amongst these figures is an array of imaginary animal forms; two-legged creatures, horned centaurs, and mysterious birds that form a mythical menagerie that fills the picture plane. The variety of media that Gorky calls into the service of creating his composition—crayon, ink, and graphite—also adds a tangible sense of texture, adding to the evocative atmosphere of this alluring work on paper.
The unique visual language of Gorky’s work has also been attributed to his forced displacement from his Armenian homeland. After his arrival in the United States in 1920, Gorky began to combine mythical elements from his native land with the fundamentals of Post-Impressionism, Analytic Cubism, and Surrealism to produce an exceptional form of expression that would pave the way for his later seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. His synthesis of Modernism's many inventions, combined with his passionate embrace of nature, created a new vision for painting that would inform the work of his fellow artists of the 1940s and 1950s, from Willem de Kooning to Clyfford Still. Beginning in the late 1930s, but not becoming fully achieved until the 1940s and works such as the present example, Gorky—having already assimilated the pictorial innovations of Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, and the surrealists—embarked on a new territory.
Untitled was likely created at the rural farm in the Shenandoah landscape of Virgina where the Gorky family stayed during the latter half of 1943. This was a crucial period for the artist as he made over 290 drawings en plein air in his new automatic, gestural style. The present work is one of the more finished and accomplished of these drawings as it includes graphite, crayon, and ink. It was here that Gorky was finally able to free himself from the constrains of his earlier influences and find his own unique voice. Of this period, the artist Dorothea Tanning once remarked, “At times, someone appears who sees all. Gorky was one of these. Agonizingly, he saw everything that was being done in painting, and that had already been done. He admired certain faraway artists' works with evident passion, and, like a dye you swallow before the X-ray, it showed up in his own pictures. It stained them with the dreams of his idols until, in his last five or six years, and emerging from the spell as from anesthesia, he found his own way, solitary and sovereign” (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 48).
Gorky’s oeuvre provided inspiration for generations of artists who followed. In addition to de Kooning, generations of artists have acknowledged the effect that Gorky has had on their own careers. Helen Frankenthaler recognized the debt she owed to Gorky and painted her masterpiece Mountains and Sea (1952, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) the year after she saw his posthumous show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Parallels have also been drawn between Gorky’s spontaneous use of graphite and the dynamic passages of color that he lays down on top of them and the work of Cy Twombly. In addition, the poetic grace of Gorky’s graphic line has been traced to the work of Robert Mangold and even Eva Hesse.
Untitled succinctly encapsulates many of the ideas that Gorky pioneered. The elusive memories of his homeland and his newly distilled abstraction captured within this sumptuous work clearly demonstrate the universal supremacy of his art. “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with is eyes,” Gorky once explained. “Abstract art enables the artists to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipator of the mind” (A. Gorky quoted in M. Auping, Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years, exh. cat., Fort Worth and Buffalo, 1995, p. 88).
This highly sophisticated master drawing by Arshile Gorky perfectly encapsulates why the artist is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century art. Displaying elements of Surrealism and the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism, this beguiling work connects two of the most important artistic traditions of the period. From the clandestine figures that populate the center of the composition to the more expressive gestural marks around the edges, the present work also displays the complete range of Gorky’s considerable graphic arsenal. The present work was included in the definitive 1981 exhibition: Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948, A Retrospective, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and having been in the same private family collection for nearly 50 years, Untitled offers a rare opportunity to acquire one of Gorky’s most accomplished works on paper.
Filling the entirety of the sheet, Gorky choreographs a range of evocative forms and gestures into a progression of figures set within a scene redolent of a landscape. Some of these personnages are rendered as complex twisting and torquing fields of color, while others—such as the spectral form on the extreme right—are conjured up from the merest flourishes of Gorky’s pencil. Interspersed amongst these figures is an array of imaginary animal forms; two-legged creatures, horned centaurs, and mysterious birds that form a mythical menagerie that fills the picture plane. The variety of media that Gorky calls into the service of creating his composition—crayon, ink, and graphite—also adds a tangible sense of texture, adding to the evocative atmosphere of this alluring work on paper.
The unique visual language of Gorky’s work has also been attributed to his forced displacement from his Armenian homeland. After his arrival in the United States in 1920, Gorky began to combine mythical elements from his native land with the fundamentals of Post-Impressionism, Analytic Cubism, and Surrealism to produce an exceptional form of expression that would pave the way for his later seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. His synthesis of Modernism's many inventions, combined with his passionate embrace of nature, created a new vision for painting that would inform the work of his fellow artists of the 1940s and 1950s, from Willem de Kooning to Clyfford Still. Beginning in the late 1930s, but not becoming fully achieved until the 1940s and works such as the present example, Gorky—having already assimilated the pictorial innovations of Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, and the surrealists—embarked on a new territory.
Untitled was likely created at the rural farm in the Shenandoah landscape of Virgina where the Gorky family stayed during the latter half of 1943. This was a crucial period for the artist as he made over 290 drawings en plein air in his new automatic, gestural style. The present work is one of the more finished and accomplished of these drawings as it includes graphite, crayon, and ink. It was here that Gorky was finally able to free himself from the constrains of his earlier influences and find his own unique voice. Of this period, the artist Dorothea Tanning once remarked, “At times, someone appears who sees all. Gorky was one of these. Agonizingly, he saw everything that was being done in painting, and that had already been done. He admired certain faraway artists' works with evident passion, and, like a dye you swallow before the X-ray, it showed up in his own pictures. It stained them with the dreams of his idols until, in his last five or six years, and emerging from the spell as from anesthesia, he found his own way, solitary and sovereign” (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 48).
Gorky’s oeuvre provided inspiration for generations of artists who followed. In addition to de Kooning, generations of artists have acknowledged the effect that Gorky has had on their own careers. Helen Frankenthaler recognized the debt she owed to Gorky and painted her masterpiece Mountains and Sea (1952, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) the year after she saw his posthumous show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Parallels have also been drawn between Gorky’s spontaneous use of graphite and the dynamic passages of color that he lays down on top of them and the work of Cy Twombly. In addition, the poetic grace of Gorky’s graphic line has been traced to the work of Robert Mangold and even Eva Hesse.
Untitled succinctly encapsulates many of the ideas that Gorky pioneered. The elusive memories of his homeland and his newly distilled abstraction captured within this sumptuous work clearly demonstrate the universal supremacy of his art. “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with is eyes,” Gorky once explained. “Abstract art enables the artists to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipator of the mind” (A. Gorky quoted in M. Auping, Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years, exh. cat., Fort Worth and Buffalo, 1995, p. 88).