When an iconic Arshile Gorky painting whose whereabouts had been unknown for the past 80 years made its way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art a few years ago, the excitement it generated became the inspiration for the first major survey of the artist’s work in 30 years. Coupled with an abundance of new scholarship, “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective,” now open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, explores the self-taught master’s stylistic evolution and positions him as the last great Surrealist.
“Woman with a Palette,” believed to have been created in 1927, had not been seen by curators or the public since Gorky’s friend Mac Vogel removed it from the artist’s Union Square studio some time in the early 1930s.
In an exclusive interview, Vogel’s daughter, Louise, recounted the history of the painting.
A large work measuring 53½ by 37½ inches, “Woman with a Palette” had hung for many decades over the mantel in the Vogels’ home in Queens, N.Y. Another Gorky, an abstract with apple, and a Willem de Kooning painting of eggs and a potato masher, hung nearby. Vogel is believed to have purchased the three works in an effort to help out the two struggling artists with whom he had once lived.
By the time Vogel died in 1991, the 64-year-old work of art had deteriorated. Someone, perhaps Vogel’s wife, removed the painting from the wall, storing it in an unknown corner or closet. The painting was not seen again until early in 2000, when Vogel’s daughter, who had lived in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, for many years, made a rare stateside visit home.
She found the family home itself deteriorating and under repair. “Woman with a Palette” surfaced from amid rubble on the kitchen floor, its canvas buckling and a hole in its lower right quadrant. Louise salvaged the work and placed it out of harm’s way.
Back in Mexico, she became preoccupied with other things, including the care of her mother, who had moved to the Yucatan capital. But by the time Christmas 2001 rolled around, she was again thinking about the painting.
At a party she met Scott Rothstein, an American on leave from his State Department posting in India. Rothstein took an interest in Vogel’s story and began researching the works of art. He focused primarily on the largest of the three, “Woman with a Palette.”
Arshile Gorky, a self-taught artist who meticulously worked through concepts with drawings, had presupposed “Woman with a Palette.” Art historians and curators had long known the studies but no one had ever seen the finished painting. Experts assumed it had been lost or destroyed in the 1946 studio fire.
Working from India, Rothstein found drawings on the Internet and forwarded them to Vogel, stressing caveats such as “could be” and “gray area.” He tracked and fed her information on auction records. When Vogel complained about the high cost of New York City art storage units, Rothstein suggested one in his hometown of Philadelphia. Vogel, who was pressed for time on that visit, recalls that she rented a van and drove the painting to Philadelphia herself. There she was met by a photographer Rothstein had contacted to document the painting’s condition.
Meanwhile, Vogel had placed the smaller Gorky and the de Kooning on consignment with a New York City gallery.
Eventually, Rothstein advised Vogel that the Philadelphia Museum of Art owned two important works by Gorky. Vogel then initiated an email correspondence that continued over the course of several months until Suzanne Penn, conservator of paintings, viewed “Woman with a Palette” at the storage facility.
Penn has said that she was immediately certain that “Woman with a Palette” was a pivotal piece. The painting was transferred to the museum for further study. When Michael Taylor, curator and Gorky scholar, saw it, he concurred with Penn’s assessment.
On that, they offered to store the smaller Gorky and the de Kooning that Vogel had placed with the New York dealer.
As Rothstein had noted in his email, the Philadelphia Museum of Art already had in its permanent collection the 1930s Cubist-inspired work “Abstraction with a Palette” and the 1948 piece, “Dark Green Painting.” That latter work is a violently fluid abstraction flush with mature iconography. “Woman with a Palette” provided the first stepping-stone in a visual tracing of Gorky’s technique.
Evaluated on its own, “Woman with a Palette” marks the departure point for a sequence of Cubist paintings and works on paper that reveal the artist’s systematic immersion in European Modernism and his growing use of line and color. It also clearly anticipates the “Portrait of Master Bill (de Kooning),” 1937.
The timing of the acquisition was fortuitous. In the three decades since Gorky had last been surveyed, three biographies had been published. There was new scholarship supported by Gorky’s widow, Agnes Magruder Gorky Fleming.
During the two years it took Penn to restore the grime-laden, cracked and curling oil on canvas, curators identified loan pieces. “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” features more than 180 works by the artist. “Woman with a Palette” is shown along with its studies.
Accompanying the exhibit is the volume Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective , published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press. Essays by noted art historians Harry Cooper, Jody Patterson, Robert Storr, Michael Taylor and Kim Theriault present new theoretical approaches to the artist’s work.
As Michael Taylor states in the introduction, “Gorky’s important role in the international Surrealist movement throughout the 1940s and beyond has been downplayed in the literature on the artist, which has instead over-emphasized his links with the nascent Abstract Expressionist group.”
Essays also revisit Gorky’s Armenian childhood and its influence on his work. Named Vostanig Adolin, the child spent his early years in Khorkom, a tiny village near Lake Van in western Armenia. At home, his time was filled with nature, folklore and religion. Gorky’s mother supplemented this rural education by introducing him to architecture and art.
The Armenian genocide destroyed all that Gorky had come to love. The family escaped to Yerevan. There, Gorky’s mother died from starvation. It was a loss Gorky would attempt to redirect throughout his life. “The Artist and His Mother,” 1926‱936, and “The Artist and His Mother,” 1926‱942, are among his most self-revealing works.
The abuses of genocide and immigration manifested themselves in obsessive studio behavior. They also turned him into a social chameleon, a man as likely to make up a story about his past as he was to adopt the pseudonym Arshile Gorky.
While most émigrés from war-torn countries take the safe route to security, Gorky risked breaking free. Standing 6 feet 4 inches tall, he was a recognizable figure in the museums and galleries he used as training grounds. An autodidact, he did not copy as much as he enlisted the styles of painters living and dead.
In the early days, Gorky famously channeled Paul Cézanne, working through the formal complexities of the master’s paintings, taking on his rustic features in self-portraits. “Still Life with Skull,” 1928, arguably Gorky’s most important painting of the decade, evokes the fatalistic mood of Cezanne’s still lifes. Ultimately, by gaining understanding of Cézanne’s paintings, Gorky acquired the confidence to pursue Modern art.
By the late 1920s, he was being influenced by Matisse, Miró and Picasso. As he told his dealer, Julien Levy, “I had been with Cezanne for a long time. Now, I am with Picasso.” This affinity is particularly clear in “Still Life (Composition with Vegetables),” 1928.
Gorky’s exploration of Cubism and Modernist abstraction is exemplified by “Organization (Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia),” 1933″6. In it, the palette continues to be a signature theme symbolic of the artist’s profession.
At about the same time, Gorky created “Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limit,” a Works Progress Administration project for the administration building of Newark Airport. Though he was already exploring Surrealism, experts agree that Gorky’s easel paintings of that era show a greater preoccupation with Surrealistic techniques than do the murals. Perhaps he purposefully created images he thought the public would understand. Either way, the murals were not well reviewed at the time.
In 1942, having fully realized that he would never again see his homeland, Gorky began to memorialize the Armenian countryside. On a two-week painting expedition in Connecticut, he worked from nature, incorporating into his studies and paintings elements of the natural world that came to characterize his mature period. During a painting expedition in Virginia, he created more than 100 drawings from nature. In 1943, Gorky painted “Garden in Sochi.”
The latter underscores the autobiographical nature of his work, as does this quote from the 1995 exhibition catalog for “Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years.”
“Sweet Vartoosh,” he wrote to his sister, “loving memories of our garden in Armenia’s Khorkom haunt me frequently&⁉n my art I often draw our garden and recreate its precious greenery and life. Can a son forget the soil which sires him? Beloveds, the stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist’s brush. And as the eye functions as the brain’s sentry, I communicate my most private perceptions through my art, my view of the world. In trying to probe beyond the ordinary and the known, I create an inner infinity. I probe within the confines of the finite to create an infinity.”
Ultimately, as Michael Taylor has written in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective , “Gorky can only be understood within the context of Surrealism’s engagement with the natural world since its formation in Paris in 1924. Gorky’s freely improvised paintings and drawings&eveloped into a highly original form of Surrealist automatism, in which recognizable imagery, such as waterfalls, flowers and insects, became the basis of an abstract visual language replete with explosive, erotic energy.”
This evaluation is realized in the “Waterfall” series, circa 1942‱943, “Housatonic Falls,” 1943‱944, and “Sachary’s Orchard,” 1943.
By 1945, Gorky was both recognized and, for the first time in his career, without financial worries. He moved the family to Connecticut and converted a barn for his studio.
Where life should have been good, it turned tragic. A fire in the Connecticut studio destroyed 27 recent paintings. His wife ran off for a short affair with his good friend. Doctors discovered colon cancer. The recommended operation left him in severe and constant pain. This was followed by a car crash. In 1948, Arshile Gorky hanged himself.
“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” puts to rest any doubt of the complexity of his art or the influence of his work on the succeeding generation of American painters.
The exhibition will be on view through January 10. It will then travel to Tate Modern London (February 10⁍ay 3) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (June 6⁓eptember 20).
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is at 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. For more information, 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org .
