Arshile Gorky

Although painted during one of the most tumultuous times in his life, Untitled was also created during Arshile Gorky’s greatest surge of artistic expression.  Following a catastrophic fire in January of 1946, and a cancer operation in 1947, “Gorky many times expressed his belief that suffering resulted in the ability to feel more deeply and to perceive more keenly.” (Melvin P. Lader, Arshile Gorky, New York, 1985, p. 93).  Marked by his first major one man show in 1945 and culminating in the Whitney annual of January 1948, this three year period represents the pinnacle of Gorky’s career.  By 1945 he had reached his full artistic maturity and originality, as evidenced by The Unattainable, 1945, Summation, 1946 and Agony, 1947. 

Untitled superbly captures the originality of expression and poetic undertones of Gorky’s ouevre.  As Gorky stated in 1946, “true art is art with depth and feeling...it is saturated with thought and must force the viewer to contribute a part of himself in order to extract as much as possible...Real art should stimulate man’s...mind." (Ibid., p. 111).  Gorky’s connections to the Surrealist traditions are palpable in the present work's many faceted composition.  The delicate blue and purple translucent veils of color suggest a primordial atmosphere, an expansive and undefined landscape in which forms, suggestive of objects and figures, exist in a cloud of uncertainty.  Gorky’s extraordinary dexterity is evident in the fluent and uniform lines threading across the canvas, entwining and defining the bimorphic forms, uniting the disparate fields and blending his vision in a highly tuned work of lyrical abstraction. Arshile Gorky’s poetic nature and refined artistic abilities are keenly felt in this gem of a painting.  A true link between European Modernism and American Amstract Expressionism, Gorky had created a style and manner of expression uniquely his own.  Oft misunderstood during his lifetime, it wasn’t until many years after his tragic suicide in 1948 that Gorky’s contributions and achievements were fully understood and his ambition of joining the Pantheon of Modern Masters was finally realized.