Untitled

Formerly in the personal collection of the legendary gallery owner Allan Stone, this 1938 painting by Arshile Gorky overflows with his unique interplay of line, form and color. Passages of high-keyed pigment jostle with one another in a manner that mines the rich traditions of Cubism and Surrealism. Vivid geometric shapes abut black and white forms, which are then topped with circles giving them an anthropomorphic quality which resembles a bustling crowd of people. Yet this is neither figuration nor abstraction, as Gorky’s artistic discourse lies somewhere in between—a unique language that often reflected his own Armenian heritage. “At times, someone appears who sees all. Gorky was one of these. Agonizingly, he saw everything that was being done in painting, and that had already been done. He admired certain faraway artists' works with evident passion, and, like a dye you swallow before the X-ray, it showed up in his own pictures. It stained them with the dreams of his idols until, in his last five or six years, and emerging from the spell as from anesthesia, he found his own way, solitary and sovereign” (D. Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 48).

After his move to the United States in 1920 Gorky combined elements of his Armenian homeland with elements from Post-Impressionism, Analytic Cubism and Surrealism to produce a unique form of expression that would pave the way for the seismic shift of the New York School. His synthesis of modernism's many inventions, combined with his passionate embrace of nature, created a new vision for painting that would inform the work of his fellow artists of the 1940s and 1950s, from Willem de Kooning to Clyfford Still. In the late 1930s, Gorky, having already assimilated the pictorial innovations of Cézanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro and the surrealists, embarked on a new territory. Critic Donald Kuspit wrote in his 1998 essay Arshile Gorky in the Thirties, that in works from this period we see the beginning of this pure, autonomous, highly fluid, unpredictable line which begins in nature and ends in pure expression.
Traces of cubist still life can be glimpsed in Gorky's paintings of the 1930s, including the present work, where certain recognizable forms are vaguely identifiable amid the composition. But surrealist imagery gave the crucial impetus for the expression of Gorky's "living dream"—an intriguing hybrid imagery of description, memory and pure abstraction. Influenced by Joan Miró, Gorky integrates figure and ground, expressing his sense of fantasy in abstracted forms that exist as a cosmos amid a vast expanse. Unlike Miró, however, Gorky's shapes remain relatively flat without any sense of modeling or spatial illusionism.
Gorky's late preoccupation with his Armenian origins, visible in the published letters of his last decade, prompted many iconographical interpretations of the new painterly forms that he established in the late 1930s. His insistence of "going beyond realism" can be seen in his letter of 1939: "Art is more than mere chronicle. It must mirror the intellect and the emotion, for anyone, even a commercial artist or illustrator, can portray realism. The mind's eye in its infinity of radiations and not optical vision of necessity holds the key to truth. It is left for the artist to forge the new metal, to resurrect his ancient role as the uncoverer and interpreter, but never the recorder, of life's secrets" (A. Gorky quoted in ibid, p. 79).

Writing for a catalogue of Gorky's works in 1945, surrealist writer André Breton succinctly described the ambiguity of the painter's unique hybrid forms: "By 'hybrids' I mean the resultants provoked in an observer contemplating a natural spectacle with extreme concentration, the resultants being a combination of the spectacle and a flux of childhood and other memories, and the observer being gifted to a rare degree with the grace of emotion" (A. Breton, "The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky," Arshile Gorky, exh. cat., Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1945).