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Tate Modern Exhibition

Arshile Gorky A Retrospective

10 February – 3 May 2010
Arshile Gorky a retrospective exhibition banner
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Life with Gorky

This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (c.1904–1948). Along with Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, Gorky was one of the most powerful American painters of the twentieth century, and a seminal figure in the formation of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition includes paintings and drawings from across his career, and a handful of rarely seen sculptures.

The Armenian-born artist first arrived in the US in 1920 fleeing persecution in his home country. He adopted the name Arshile Gorky with reference to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. First in Boston and, after 1924, then in New York, he studied the Modern European masters in books and galleries, teaching himself art by combining this with art classes. His early still lifes show his reliance upon the examples of Cézanne, Picasso and others, but his portraits in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the two versions of The Artist and His Mother, show how Gorky was able to pour his personal experiences and his studies into a highly individual realism.

During the 1940s Gorky encountered Surrealists exiled from wartime Europe. Stimulated by their ideas of free flowing, automatic painting, he rapidly developed the style for which he became famous. Works such as Waterfall 1943 are evocative, layered, and translucent, with a liquid glowing quality. Gorky's characteristic paintings of this final period include biomorphic forms in strong colours, shifting abstract elements and the energetic line that he developed in his drawings. They capture a sensual enjoyment of landscape as well as the mood and memories that the subjects can evoke. Just as he came to be seen as a leading figure in Abstract Expressionism, his career was cut short by a series of personal tragedies, which ended with him committing suicide in 1948.

The most important figure in American Art before J.Pollock
The Daily Telegraph

Tate Modern

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
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Dates

10 February – 3 May 2010

In partnership with

Times Newspapers Ltd

Times Newspapers Ltd

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    Atom Egoyan on Arshile Gorky

    Independent filmmaker Atom Egoyan talks about a number of his installations and short films that relate to Arshile Gorky's life and artistic legacy in relation to the Armenian massacres, which are widely regarded as a genocide.

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    Life with Gorky: Director's Q&A

    This intimate portrait of Gorky by his granddaughter Cosima Spender includes interviews with Mougouch Gorky, the artist’s widow, about their life together.

  • Arshile Gorky drawing in a field at Crooked Run Farm 1944

    My Gorky

    Mougouch Fielding and Cosima Spender

    The influential Armenian-born American painter Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) was described as the last of the great Surrealists, the first of the Abstract Expressionists and one of the most important figures in twentieth-century art. He was, as Willem de Kooning said, an artist with “fantastic instinct”, largely self-taught, who absorbed masters of modern European art, but whose most recurring imagery was based on memories of his childhood. A turning point in his life came in 1941 when he married Agnes Magruder (whom he called “Mougouch” – an Armenian term of endearment), and this relationship was to have an extraordinary effect on his painting. On the eve of Tate Modern’s retrospective exhibition, the artist’s widow tells the story of her life with Gorky to her granddaughter. 

  • Artist

    Arshile Gorky

    c.1904–1948
  • Arshile Gorky in the Tate collection

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