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  • Tate Modern

    TATE MODERN

    Art Newspaper
    http://www.theartnewspaper.com/whatson/r esults.asp?id=1108967
    WEDNESDAY, 3.2.10
    London, United Kingdom

    Tate Modern hosts a retrospective of Arshile Gorky (about 1904-1948),
    the Armenian-born, US artist whose untimely death and tragic life
    story has often overshadowed his work. "He's an artist who played a
    pivotal role in mid-20th century American Art," says Matthew Gale,
    the curator (modern) and head of display at Tate Modern. "It's timely
    to look back at the origins of abstract expressionism.

    He's a hinge between it and surrealism." Largely self-taught, although
    at one point he claimed to have studied with Kandinsky in Paris,
    the young Gorky's debt to Cezanne and Picasso is obvious.

    He called them his "idols".

    Gale challenges the idea that the artist's work in the early 1920s
    was merely derivative, however. "What's evident in these works is
    the elegance of his line, and his warm, 'Gorksian' colouring." Gorky
    was born in what is now eastern Turkey, and along with thousands of
    Armenians he fled during the massacres of the first world war.

    His mother died of starvation en route.

    Reaching the US in 1920, he assumed a new name and identity (he was
    born Vostanig Manuk Adoian.) The exhibition includes two haunting
    versions of The Artist and His Mother (about 1926-36), which refer
    indirectly to his traumatic childhood.

    Living in the heart of Lower Manhattan, Gorky cut a handsome and
    charismatic figure in New York's fashionable avant-garde circles
    during the late 1920s and 30s.

    Work from that period shows his importance as a surrealist-Andre
    Breton was an admirer-but also his move towards abstract expressionism.

    Waterfall, 1943, acquired by the Tate in 1971, shows a "loosening
    of line".

    This and layers of paint preface the work of Rothko and Pollock in
    later years, says Gale. Suffering from cancer and the injuries of
    a car crash, and separated from his wife, he hung himself in 1948,
    just as New York was becoming the centre of the modern art world.

    Gale thinks that the artist's tragic life story can "get in the way"
    of appreciating his work and importance. The retrospective has been
    organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it has already
    shown, in association with Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art,
    Los Angeles, where its tour ends (6 June until 20 September). J.P.

    The Artist and His Mother, about 1926-36

    The Artist and His Mother, about 1926-36
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