Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years 
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 
January 14 - March 17, 1996 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will exhibit Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years at the Modern's main location in Fort Worth's Cultural District. The exhibition has been organized by the Modern Art Museum in cooperation with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Michael Auping, Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum and former Chief Curator of the Albright-Knox, conceived of this presentation as a tribute to the Armenian-born American artist Arshile Gorky, and the historical impact of his lush, gestural paintings of the 1940s on the development of American art. This exhibition features 42 major paintings and drawings that illustrate Arshile Gorky's critical role as a link between European surrealism and the American abstract expressionist movement of the 1950s.

Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanik Adoian in 1904 in Khorkom, Armenia. The artist's childhood was marked by poignant suffering and tragedy caused by the Turkish invasions of Armenia and subsequent ethnic persecutions. Gorky's father fled to America in search of a new life for his family. During this difficult time Gorky witnessed the death of his mother by starvation as she sacrificed herself for the lives In the 1940s Arshile Gorky began to merge ideas from surrealism with his admiration for the art of Joan Miro and Wassily Kandinsky. As Michael Auping states in the exhibition catalogue: "Remembered landscapes from [Gorky's] childhood home in Armenia fuse surrealist representation with abstract plumes of color, anticipating the enigmatic symbols and expressive gestures that would be a hallmark of abstract expressionism." Works in the exhibition form the pinnacle of Gorky's artistic expression and illustrate the role he played in "leading American painting into one of the most experimental periods in its history," according to Michael Auping.

The presentation begins with a series of breakthrough paintings and drawings from Arshile Gorky's famed Garden in Sochi (1938-1942) series. Other major works featured in the exhibition are: Waterfall (1942-43) from the Tate Gallery, London; How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life (1944) from the Seattle Art Museum; Love of the New Gun (1944) from The Peril Collection, Houston; and the National Gallery's One Year the Milkweed (1944). Waterfall and One Year the Milkweed are composed of veils of luminous color that illustrate how Arshile Gorky translated abstracted surrealist forms into highly personalized imagery.

The highlight of the exhibition is the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), recognized as the fullest and grandest of Gorky's paintings. In this work, Gorky presents viewers with an imagined reality——a psychological landscape——full of intricate imagery and sensuous colors. This grand painting is rarely loaned and has not left Buffalo in more than a decade. These paintings are accompanied by a selection of eighteen drawings that track Gorky's complex working methods throughout the 1940s.

The dramatic intensity of Arshile Gorky's later works, such as Agony (1947) from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, coincided with a series of disasters in the artist's life including a fire in his studio, an automobile accident in which his painting arm was paralyzed, and a separation from his second wife and their children. On July 21, 1948, Arshile Gorky committed suicide in his Sherman, Connecticut studio at the age of 44.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is the final venue for Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years, which was exhibited last year at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (May 7 - September 17, 1995) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (October 13 - December 31, 1995.)

A fully-illustrated catalogue published by Rizzoli International, with essays by Dore Ashton, Michael Auping and Matthew Spender, and selected letters written by the artist, accompanies the exhibition. Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition and catalogue were also made possible, in part, by The Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funding from the T.J. Brown and C.A. Lupton Foundation, Fort Worth.

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH, TEXAS
www.mamfw.org

Updated 23.06.2019