Exhibitions, Fall 2007

		Arshile Gorky, Armenian-American, 1904-1948. Untitled, c. 1935 Graphite on paper, 111⁄8 x 8 inches Museum purchase with support of the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust and the Museum Volunteer Board, 2007.4. Image © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Arshile Gorky
Drawings, The Early Years
August 24 - October 28

Arshile Gorky (1904-1947) escaped the Armenian genocide, immigrating to the United States at the age of 16 and adopting his last name from that of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and lived in New York. By the end of his career, Gorky was an undisputed master of modern art and a seminal member of the Abstract Expressionists.

Featuring about 15 drawings and one painting from a private collection, the exhibition, previously seen at the CDS Gallery in New York, focuses on Gorky's early works, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, a period during which he was clearly looking at Miró, Cézanne, and Picasso. “As a group the drawings and paintings mirror Gorky's stylistic evolution up to the point in the late 1930s when he began to truly digest and synthesize so many of his early influences on the verge of finding his own unique language and style,” writes the late Gorky scholar Melvin P. Lader in the catalogue essay. “Examples of his absorption of Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism and aspects of Surrealism are plentiful in these works,” he notes. The selection, primarily still lifes and figures, can be studied in terms of how Gorky learned to free the object from its associations and turn it into an abstract compositional element. The exhibition was originally organized by the Los Angeles gallery Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in 2005, which produced the catalogue Arshile Gorky, the early years.

This exhibition is made possible by the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, Acquavella Galleries, and Arts$.

Gallery Talk
by Dore Ashton

October 4, 5:30 pm
Campbell Hall 160

A foremost educator, art critic and art historian, Ashton received an MA in art history from Harvard University and in 1969 was appointed head of the Department of Art and Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York (she is now a professor of art history at the school). She has served as associate editor at Art Digest (1952-1954), critic for Arts and Architecture and at the New York Times (1955-1960), and correspondent for several foreign publications. She has written numerous books on artists, including Joseph Cornell, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko.