Gorky, Modern Painter - " From Mimic to Master of Invention"

Water of the Flowery Mill, A.Gorky, Oil, 1944

PHILADELPHIA — Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century.

Before that he was many other artists. He was Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró, André Masson and Roberto Matta, more or less in that order, as he assiduously and almost selflessly emulated a succession of existing personal styles to teach himself how to be a painter.

This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape. Gorky’s protracted apprenticeship was followed by distinctive wonders: the rustling and throbbing landscape in “Water of the Flowery Mill”; the penumbral, narcotized mood piece called “Soft Night”; the meat-colored “Agony,” which suggests a slab of burned flesh and dates from 1947, the year before Gorky died...- source, NY Times, article by Holland Carter

Link Full Text, NY Times, Holland Carter

Link Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Link Google Images

“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. It then travels to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.