Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

Arshile Gorky (born Vosdanig Adoian, c.1904–48) was a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art in the middle of the 20th century. Born in an Armenian village on the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky was a first-hand witness to the Turkish government's Armenian Genocide of 1915, which led the artist's family and thousands of others to flee. In 1920, Gorky emigrated to the United States and eventually settled in New York, where he became a largely self-taught artist. At a time when the American avant-garde privileged originality over traditional working methods, Gorky was a nonconformist who developed his personal vocabulary through a series of intensive apprenticeships to the styles of other artists, including Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró, before developing his own unique and deeply influential visual language in the early 1940s. Gorky's prominence in the New York art scene led him to befriend André Breton and Roberto Matta-fellow &eacutemigr&eacutes and key figures in the surrealist group—who came to have an enormous impact on Gorky's mature style. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective positions Gorky as a crucial founder of abstract expressionism, but also as a passionate and dedicated artist whose tragic life often informed his groundbreaking and deeply personal paintings. The first full-scale survey of Gorky's work since 1981, this timely exhibition features Gorky's most significant paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, including two masterworks in MOCA's collection->em>Study for The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1943) and Betrothal I (1947). Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition is on view October 21, 2009, through January 10, 2010, before traveling to Tate Modern, London, in spring 2010. MOCA's presentation, the third on the exhibition’s tour, is organized by MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that includes new essays by Harry Cooper, Jody Patterson, Robert Storr, and Kim Theriault.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The international tour is made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The U.S. tour is supported by The Lincy Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Arshile Gorky
A Retrospective