.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"Gorky's drawings exhibit the muscular grace of the a graphite line drawn with authority and passion; one moment his hand glides or skips, the next it fiercely scratches .The power and importance of his drawings lie in the beauty and sensuousness of the forms and the whole composition as abstraction, rather than any individual part" (J. C. Lee, "Arshile Gorky: The Power of Drawing," in J. C. Lee, M. P. Lader, Arshile Gorky A Retrospective of Drawing, exh. cat., New York, 2003, p. 80).
The powerful and muscular lines of Gorky's Study for a Delicate Game dance across the surface of this work with energy and grace interspersed with flashes of vivid color. Neither abstract nor figurative, this work provides glorious evidence of Gorky's masterful handing of both line and form that combines to produce works that poetically evoke something mysterious and beckon the viewer into Gorky's world. The meandering lines can almost be identified as recognizable forms, but just at the point at which they start to cohere into decipherable shapes, Gorky pulls back and allows the lines to assume their own identity, which teeters on the brink of abstraction and figuration.
Gorky had a profound and well-known passion for drawing and considered draftsmanship to be the foundation of his creative enterprise. In 1942, a few years before he executed Study for a Delicate Game, he wrote to his sister, "Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint. Drawing gives the artist the ability to control his line and hand. It develops in him the precision of line and touch. This is the path towards a masterwork" (A. Gorky quoted in K. Mooradian, Arshile Gorky Adoian, Chicago, 1978, p. 276). Like his most fluid and spontaneous drawings, Study for a Delicate Game is marked by the rigorous control and precision for which he strived. His mastery of this process can be seen in his ability to produce myriad mysterious shapes and forms that emerges out of an amalgam of lines and marks made on the paper's surface.
The powerful and muscular lines of Gorky's Study for a Delicate Game dance across the surface of this work with energy and grace interspersed with flashes of vivid color. Neither abstract nor figurative, this work provides glorious evidence of Gorky's masterful handing of both line and form that combines to produce works that poetically evoke something mysterious and beckon the viewer into Gorky's world. The meandering lines can almost be identified as recognizable forms, but just at the point at which they start to cohere into decipherable shapes, Gorky pulls back and allows the lines to assume their own identity, which teeters on the brink of abstraction and figuration.
Gorky had a profound and well-known passion for drawing and considered draftsmanship to be the foundation of his creative enterprise. In 1942, a few years before he executed Study for a Delicate Game, he wrote to his sister, "Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint. Drawing gives the artist the ability to control his line and hand. It develops in him the precision of line and touch. This is the path towards a masterwork" (A. Gorky quoted in K. Mooradian, Arshile Gorky Adoian, Chicago, 1978, p. 276). Like his most fluid and spontaneous drawings, Study for a Delicate Game is marked by the rigorous control and precision for which he strived. His mastery of this process can be seen in his ability to produce myriad mysterious shapes and forms that emerges out of an amalgam of lines and marks made on the paper's surface.