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Plan
ahead. An ambitious exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art traces the career of the American pioneer Arshile Gorky, a
master of abstract art and personal reinvention. Philadelphia is
no longer the nation's capital, but it remains redolent with
history - the Gorky show is a fine occasion to plan a day or
weekend trip to the city of brotherly love and also reacquaint
oneself with some of the country's great monuments such as the
Liberty Bell and Graff House where Thomas Jefferson drafted the
Declaration of Independence in the spring of 1776. The
Philadelphia show -- Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective
-- is the first large-scale show of the artist's work in over 30 years, a critical re-take
of sorts, and paintings will be hung in the wonderfully-termed
'creation chambers' which are modeled after the artist's own
description of his Union Square studio in New York. This
all-encompassing survey follows Gorky's complex artistic evolution
and does not merely focus on the well-known details of his often
tragic life. Certainly his escape from his native Armenian village
of Khorkom, his taking the name Gorky (Russian for bitter), and
his creation of an entirely new identity once he arrived in New
York have an astonishing, almost fictional quality to them. All
the more remarkable then that Gorky overcame the events of his
childhood to go on to produce some of the most beautiful, lyrical
art of the past century, works such as Abstraction with a
Palette (1930) and Dark Green Painting (1948). And
then there is his most famous painting, the sober and sobering The
Artist and His Mother (ca.1926 - 1936). The painting is based on a
childhood photograph and was painted in America, many years after
his mother's death of starvation after their escape from
Van. Gorky, the boy, is fleshed, his mother is flat and
ghostly, sorrowful dark eyes of both mother and son, and Gorky has
left his mother's hands unpainted as if the memory of his mother
was perhaps too painful for him to finish…. Gorky
was an autodidact and a voracious reader who was influenced by
some of the century's great artists before forging a unique
personal style. His early works, for example, were influenced by
Modernism, Cubism, and experimental movements and artists such as
Cézanne, Léger, Picasso and Miró. His friendship in the
1940's with members of the Surrealist movement living in New York
led Gorky to experiment with new techniques such as automatic
drawing under the tutelage of Roberto Matta. Gorky's life
ended in tragedy, as it had begun: but in between he created a
unique body of work, melding memories of his past in Khorkom with
the developments of modern art.
See:
Arshile
Gorky: A Retrospective,
October
21, 2009 through January 10, 2010
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