Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanik Manook Adoian in Van, a center of ancient Armenian culture. In 1914 the Ottoman Turkish government started a systematic persecution of the Armenians and began a savage campaign with massacres, sieges, and forced marches that was the twentieth century’s first genocide. Gorky’s mother, Shushan, died of starvation in her son’s arms. Gorky fled Van, arrived at Ellis Island and stayed with relatives in Massachusetts. He attended the New School of Design in Boston, moved to New York City, and changed his name to Arshile (a variant of Achilles) Gorky (an allusion to Maxim Gorky). Throughout the 1920s Gorky’s art was influenced by old and modern masters; d uring the 1930s he was one of the most technically accomplished painters in New York. Jacob Kainen recalled going with Gorky and John Graham to the Durlacher Gallery in early 1940 to see Poussin’s Triumph of Bacchus (on loan from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art). Kainen, well educated and knowledgeable in art, was a few years younger than Gorky, while Graham was a generation older: “Although I knew about primary compositional movements, obviously there were underlying shuttlings I hadn’t grasped.” Kainen enumerated “color sequences,” “back and forward movements,” “pulls and pulsations, ... This sort of analysis was a revelation to me.”[ 1] Gorky talked of being "with" painters: "I was with Cézanne for a long time and then naturally I was with Picasso."[2] In the 1940s he was affected by the work of the European Surrealists, particularly Roberto Matta Echaurren. He married Agnes Magruder in 1941, and called her “Mougouch,” an Armenian term of endearment. In the summer of 1942 on a visit to Connecticut he began to work from nature, something he had not done for almost fifteen years. He was inspired by Kandinsky's early abstract landscapes as well as Miró 's and Picasso’s fusing of personal memories into his own procreant works from nature. The next year was spent at Crooked Run Farm, Mougouch’s parents’ estate in Virginia, where Gorky began a series of drawings in which the forms of nature were transformed into the artist’s singular abstract style. There he produced hundreds of drawings which he later drew on for his paintings. Landscape and interior space seemed to mingle and he emerged as a truly original and important artist. Most critics, art historians, and commentators are convinced that Gorky’s imagery, however abstract, has a basis in nature. Some of the shapes suggest floral, plant and animal forms with connotations of fertility, others evoke associations with body parts so that the paintings exude an aura of sensuality or even sexuality. Janie C. Lee commented on “these late drawings … suggestive of leaves, petal, or grass … some believe Gorky’s inventions were inspired by plants and insects … while others claim that these images recall genitals or viscera and must have swelled up from Gorky’s subconscious fantasies.” [3] Gorky had many opportunities to see examples of ancient Greek architecture in the Metropolitan Museum, one of his favorite haunts. Whereas the composite capital, with its scroll-like volutes was originally based on ram’s horns, and the Anthemion or “honeysuckle ornament” was patterned on palmettes and flowers, these were abstracted into the Ionic and Corinthian columns. Just as Poussin saw the torso of a girl and compared it to the columns of the Maison Carrée of Nímes, Gorky abstracted nature in his own distinctive way. The forms in his drawings suggest a Wordsworthian aesthetic of cells, seeds, lichens, grasses, flora and fauna, and even invented life-forms. In Virginia Landscape, Jim M. Jordan saw “a flowering form, … which could be milkweed leaves or distant tree limbs. … colored with a blazing plume of crayon.”[4] Indeed, Picasso used colored crayons in sketches for Guernica: “…amid the grayness of the drawings was a sudden outburst of vivid color…”[5] “Gorky worked in the landscape,” Mougouch explained, “He thought the landscape was part of the drawing, as opposed to looking at it and then drawing it.” Gorky said, “I got them [the abstract forms] from getting down close to the earth.” When he looked into the grass, he looked with such fierce concentration that his vision turned within and dredged up remembrances, “I could hear it and smell it. Like a little world down there.”[6] This is no Hudson River School view of nature, no American Regionalism; it is non-spatial and mental. We, the observer, are not outside looking at bucolic scenery but rather are in the midst of a pantheism of fungi, matter and verdant shags of grassland. What he realized in his numerous nature drawings was an act of thinking; Gorky looked into the grass and drew his “first thoughts.”[7] Ironically, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, showing the protagonist crawling across a sea of grass, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1948. Gorky grew up in small feudal village on Lake Van where agrarian cultures saw earth as a mothering womb, seeds as spermatozoon, furrows as female genitalia, ploughs as male organs and crops as offspring. The coming together of earth, seed, furrow and plow was a marriage ceremony, the worship of the generative power in nature as symbolized in the Dionysiac festivals of ancient Greece. W.K.C. Guthrie pointed out that this “primitive practice is carried on … where the union of the human sexes on the actual ground where crops are to grow … is considered to promote fruitfulness.”[8] “For the Armenian peasant,” wrote Herrera, “farming was a religious ritual ruled by ancient traditions … The men did the sowing and the plowing; they … were the bearers of seed.”[9] The rutting dynamics of nature churns in cycles of mold, decomposition, fertilization and regeneration as photosynthesizing cells become plants. Gorky is taxonomically ambiguous, and his abstractions, like a constantly mutating contagion in cycles of regeneration, are liable to vanish and reappear unexpectedly in other drawings and paintings. Variations on many of these shapes can be found throughout his work of the 1940s. The organic dominates, suggesting close-up views of vegetal-animal forms full of details that seem to overflow with meaning, but specifics remain largely inaccessible. Just as photosynthesizing cells become plants, Gorky’s vegetal-animal kingdom became the artist’s unique abstract style. In 1993, ribonucleic acid research revealed that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants: they reproduce by spores that are able to propel themselves in an “animal-like movement “ by cilia.[10] His comprehension of nature’s bursting variety, the forces of nature and of art, are what poet Charles Baudelaire earlier characterized as “-Qui plane sur le vie et comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!” [-who, hovering over life, knows without trying / the language of silent things and of flowers.]
The artist did a series of Fireplace in Virginia drawings; indeed, paintings derived from the drawings are typically represented in Good Hope Road (Hugging) (“Good Hope Road” was the address of artist-friend, David Hare) where elements of farm and farmhouse interiors are combined. Herrera suggested the sooty interior of the fireplace (traditional symbol of hearth and home), top center, is where “flamelike shapes seems to glow in its blackness.”[11] Matthew Spender noted that the backdrop in the 1912 photograph of Gorky and his mother was a painted chimneypiece: “The original photo of Shushan and her son which Gorky took as his model includes a hearth in the background - not a real hearth but a painted hearth, whose canvassy surface is just perceptible in the photograph.”[12] André Breton, one of the great art impresarios (Lionel Abel dubbed him “the most courtly person I have ever known”), claimed Gorky for the Surrealists and pronounced him “the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed.” It was Breton who invented the term "hybrid" to describe Gorky's mysterious, ambiguous images. By means of these biomorphic hybrid forms Gorky was able to reconcile the figurative with the non‑figurative. Breton characterized hybrids as "the resultants provoked in an observer contemplating a natural spectacle and a flux of childhood and other memories..."[13] He further stated that Gorky was the only surrealist who maintained direct contact with nature, penetrating nature’s secrets to discover the “guiding thread” that links together “the innumerable physical and mental structures.” - the language of silent things and of flowers.
Drawing most likely portrays cows grazing on lush grass near the home of Gorky’s dealer, Julien Levy. The two cows (admittedly, not bulls) have legs that begin to mutate into Picassoid limbs that we see again in the Betrothals. The front leg of the center cow morphs into a curve and point, or sickle-like shape (Ethel Schwabacher refers to this recurring motif as “Persian slipper”). This gives us a clue as to how Gorky took a scene from nature and in the process of abstraction transforms it into a Gorkian concept. Indeed, the tails in Drawing, as they rise from the cow’s haunches and fall to pointed ends, climb like four-pronged “heads” with Miró-like petals in the Betrothals. Other forms in Drawing are similarly rooted in art or nature or in both. But without documentary evidence, specific readings of his forms remain speculative. And, as Herrera so accurately stated, “He did not see an object and then proceed to obfuscate or disguise it. Rather he saw objects as full of visual and metamorphic possibility, so that one image might have several referents... Gorky was very much a formalist: what he put on canvas or paper was largely determined by aesthetic concerns.” [14] Drawing also has a sun form, similar in placement to the sun in Guernica Second State.
Gorky was fascinated by Paolo Uccello’s tri-part Battle of San Romano (National Gallery, London, Uffizi, and Louvre). Indeed, the almost carrousel depiction of horses, with their arbitrary colors, plumed helmet crests like flowering bushes, ornate armor, trumpets, banners, lances, and no bloodshed, appealed to Gorky’s Armenian esthetic. In Robert Reiff’s diagram[15] (directed on the far right horseman in the National Gallery panel) he portrays the Florentine Captain-General, Niccolo Mauruzzi da Tolentino, at the head of his troops, putting his foes to flight. However, a more meaningful and dramatic scene is the unhorsing of the Sienese commander, Bernardino della Ciarda, in the Uffizi panel, where the priapic diagonal of his straightened leg, with its slipper-like armored foot pushing against the stirrup, creates greater tension and is easily abstracted into the angled portion of Gorky’s central upright figure in all the Betrothals.
Interestingly, the rider in Gorky’s Man on Horse, after the Panathenaic Frieze around the walls of the Parthenon cella, shows a cavalcade of Athenian knights on horseback with angled leg similar to the angled “leg” of the erect upright form in the Betrothals. Indeed, careful attention to details in his drawing show a slipper-delineated foot on the horseman, as well as on the second rider to the right; even the hoof of the forward horse has a slipper-like shape, worked over and superimposed.
Melvin P. Lader pointed out that Pieter Brueghel’s The Peasant Dance (c.1567, Kunsthistorisches Museum) was reproduced in The Arts magazine, September 1926, with a detailed notation by Gorky in the margin. Gorky focused on “the shape of the hat of a seated figure, sketching it along the lower right edge of the page.”[16] However, if we reverse the shape of the musician’s right leg with its emphatic slipper, we find another shape and slant similar to the angled portion of Gorky’s vertical upright rider in the Betrothals; and of course it also compares with Bernardino della Ciarda’s priapic leg. Furthermore, in Self Portrait, Study for the Artist’s Mother[17] (c.1936) the young Gorky’s slippered foot is emphasized, worked over, and also is similar to the oblique leg of the Betrothals’ upright rider.
The Betrothals differ significantly from the Landscape style, and evidently Gorky reverted to Picasso’s formidable influence once again. Not that he consciously sought Picasso’s authority as he did in the 1930s; rather he very probably recalled unconsciously the Guernican phenomenon. Certainly many of the forms and shapes that appear in Guernica and related studies can be found in the Betrothals. While the Landscape and nature drawings formed the basis for many paintings, the Betrothal series abruptly incorporated a post-cubist matrix for its dominant shapes. Gorky worshiped Picasso, according to Kainen, and he told Balcomb Greene: “I feel Picasso running in my finger tips.”[18] Picasso had such a hold on him that he easily could have equated the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War with his own tragedies in the Armenian holocaust, as well as Picasso’s marital problems with his own. Picasso had passed through a time of painful conflict in his personal life, and the “conflicts had provided the imagery for much of his art from about 1933 to 1937. "These images and symbols constitute a kind of iconography of his life involving Minotaurs and women as well as the familiar theme of the struggle between the horse [always a white mare] and the bull”[19] … the totems that culminated in Guernica. On a trip to Spain in the summer of 1934 the 53 year old Picasso was accompanied, not by his wife, but by the 24 year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. On 12 July 1935, the day of Olga and Picasso’s wedding anniversary, she left him. For many months Olga and Picasso were engaged through lawyers in vitriolic conflicts over terms of separation, assets, estates, income, and art. The bombing of Guernica “had a strong impact on a Spaniard who, because he was even then deeply committed to the Republican cause, already considered himself a refugee,” according to Chipp. Reiff said of Gorky: “He never became thoroughly ‘Americanized’ … His thick accent and his exotic appearance made him keenly feel the differences;”[20] and Spender mentioned, “The phrase which was constantly on Gorky’s lips was `my country`.”[21] Certainly the slaughter of over a million Armenians, the flight from Armenia, and the loss of his mother left Gorky a refugee. Dora Maar photographed Picasso’s mural in progressive stages; these photographs were reproduced in Cahiers d’Art. The publication's aim increasingly became a chronicle of Picasso's entire development which Gorky assiduously consulted . It also kept American artists up to date on recent developments in Parisian modernism, and many artists at that time used images from Guernica and related studies in their work.
In the sweeping circular neck of Picasso’s horse in a Composition Sketch, (2 May 1937. Z.IX,8) the neck is emphasized as ovoid or semi-circular, and that emphasis is continued in other studies. This form is metamorphosed into the horse’s chest in Guernica Fourth State. This semi-circular curve becomes a horse-bull shape in the Betrothals on which an upright rider, or “bride,” is seated (here the sexual position known as Equitation is implied, possibly suggested by details in Dream and Lie of Franco). The bull’s haunches are suggested at the left in all the Betrothals. The bull's pendant testicles, readily apparent in Picasso’s many studies as well as in Guernica Sixth State to finished painting, are in the same relative position in the Betrothals. “Large pointed shapes reminiscent of Gorky’s Armenian slipper motif “ as Lader pointed out, “refer to the natural processes of penetration, fertilization, birth, and growth.”[22] April Kingsley elaborated on this when she stated: “Gorky's form language - curve and point - evolved early in his development. … When Gorky’s basic form is doubled into a heart shape … It is simultaneously a symbol of love and pain. … Gorky's passionate dialogue between sex and destruction is to be found in this simple union of vulnerable curve and piercing point.”[23] Reiff saw a “plump heart” in Composition II (1946, Baltimore Museum of Art); and in his diagrams of that drawing he documented the “repetition of heart shapes.”[24] This heart shape is used numerous times in Picasso’s symbology, from the forehead in Woman’s Head (Fernande) [1909, bronze, Museum of Modern Art] to the chins, ears, and even handkerchiefs of many of the Weeping Woman series of the late 1930s. The “moment of truth”* is when the matador’s final thrust (La Estrocada) pierces the bull’s heart - as Picasso well knew.
Indeed, the heart-shape is in much of Picasso's depictions of bulls’ testicles; these two organs, hearts and testicles, relate to man’s emotional life as they bind psyche and soma along with a substantial and inevitable identity. Klaus Kertess wrote about the Betrothals: “… the torso of a nude female leaning out of a rectangle (window) in the upper left corner…”[25] and Michael Auping noted: “Gorky uses the breasts in their insert at upper left almost as a key-signature … and suggest organically growing things with one of Gorky’s favorite devices - darkened centers within the forms that are like the nucleus of living cells.”[26] Indeed, the upper left of all three Betrothals have “rectangle (window)”-like forms similar to the window with the Girls and Doves of Venus in Picasso's Minotauromachia.
- In The Betrothal (Yale) there is a similar star shape with breasts on either side.
These forms are similar to the window of the Woman with Light in Guernica whose left hand forms a star (a symbol of Venus?) between her circular breasts.[29]
All five women have uncovered mammae in Guernica, States One and Two; the hindquarters of the Rushing Woman first appear in State Three. The circular breasts and the strong vertical line linking the steatopygia of the Rushing Woman continue through the rest of the States to the finished mural. Picasso saw the female element as “the very substance of mankind;”[30] indeed, in the final mural, despite the carnage, and except for the baby, all the women are still alive. Gorky couldn’t have failed to notice the role reversal of the Mother with Dead Child in his own tragedy. In all the Betrothals a strong vertical descends from the (breasted) star shapes to a series of horizontal ovals, like counterpoised busts and bottoms analogous to the breasts and derrières of Picasso’s Rushing Woman in her various transformations. Gorky's variation on the mammae and posteriors of Picasso's Rushing Woman is a display of ovals, like counter weights, on either side of his long vertical ciliate line. A small sprig, or spray of vegetation, underwent many changes in Guernica (lower right), as well as many changes in its interpretations: in Guernica First State, the dead female figure (she disappears by the Fifth State) was described by Arnheim: “Nothing will remain of her but the fingers of her hand, transformed into a flower.”[31] Blunt described the segment as a “woman lying across the foreground … a flower growing beside her head”[32] and Chipp stated: “There appears to be a flower held in the hand above her head and a bird fluttering at her side,”[33] and The Rushing Woman of Guernica with large knee, “genuflects before amoebic vegetation.”[34] This finger-flower-amoebic vegetation form appears in the lower right corner of the Betrothals: “surrounding a dark green parallelogram, are several shapes, many in pairs. They include raindrop and `Persian slipper` shapes.”[35] Gorky’s view of marriage was as a traditional contractual union for the purpose of raising a family, or derivatively, for sexual gratification and domestic security. Marriage makes possible a commitment that gives conjugal love its value creating "that moral centaur, man and wife" (Byron, Don Juan, CIII, clviii). Even King Lear (or was it Shakespeare?) complained that “Down from the waist they are Centaurs, / Though women all above” (IV,vi,123). Kertess wrote, “in the gridded study, the horse’s head takes on a downward looking, male visage. Is this centaur Gorky?”[36] The centaur, being the antithesis of the knight (Gorky's mother was a “Lady”), surely would have attracted Gorky to the stately Parthenon knights, as well as the clamorous throng of Uccello’s knights. Matossian notes that “Shushan’s family … are listed in the annals of the religious centre of Etchmiadzin as priests, keepers of the monastery, going back thirty-six generations. The claim that the family descended from royal blood was made, and Shushan was styled Lady.”[37] Herrera stated: “According to family legend, the Adoians were descended from a fifth-century knight called Adom. … Karlen Mooradian and his mother [Vartoosh] were apt to invent grand genealogies for their family … calls Shushan ‘Lady Shushan,’ when in fact what was left of Armenian aristocracy on the Anatolian plateau was wiped out in the thirteenth century.” [38] In preparing their biographies of Arshile Gorky, Matossian and Spender independently discovered that many of Gorky’s letters published by Karlen Mooradian were “fakes.” Herrera explained: “Mooradian invented these letters, perhaps because he wanted to present Gorky as an Armenian rather than an American artist. … In general, the parts of the published letters that speak about art or about Gorky’s attachment to Armenian culture are not written by Gorky. In an appendix Matossian lists the letters alleged to be by Gorky for which no originals exist.”[39] A close friend quoted him as saying he was "from royalty;”[40] perhaps Gorky believed “the family legend.” The analogies of Picasso and Gorky indicate that both artists left visual minutiae and references of their private lives as well as influences in their works. Like Picasso, Gorky’s old-world concept of male-female relations made for difficulties: an early love-interest complained, “… he wanted something pleasant to look at like a statue but never to interfere in his mind or soul,”[41] while Spender cited “The emotions of possession, jealousy, and violence flowed indistinguishably one into the next. They were his proofs of love … a kind of ruthlessness had emerged from him since his marriage;” and “He complained constantly to Jeanne [Reynal] about the `disrespect’ of American women in general and Mougouch in particular.”[42] Mougouch didn’t learn his real name until nearly a decade after his death. Herrera reported: “In Corinne [Michael West], Gorky had found yet another provincial whom he could mold” and that he “was attracted to a beautiful painter [Mercedes Carles, later Mercedes Matter] whom he thought he could mold.” Herrera saw the Betrothals as a marriage ceremony: “on the left, an equestrian bride wearing a wreath or a crown … Perhaps the Betrothal series is based on memories of traditional Armenian weddings in which the groom would ride to fetch his bride ... The bride would then be brought to him on a horse ...”[43] However, Matossian countered: “Gorky may have … registered the stages of disintegration of his marriage in each successive canvas.”[44] In 1946 Gorky endured a devastating studio fire where he lost much of his work, then a colostomy for rectal cancer, and in 1948 a car accident left his neck fractured and his painting arm paralyzed (Julien Levy was driving but only Gorky was injured). His jealousy, aggression and paranoia were made worse by his tragedies, and the marriage collapsed under the strain. Mougouch, worn down by his dominance, hostility and violence, and out of desperation rather than betrayal, had a brief affair with Matta . However, Gorky felt betrayed; in a collar brace and brandishing a cane with his only functional hand, threatened Matta: “I’m going to give you a good beating. You are very charming, but you have interfered with my family life.” Matta fled, Gorky returned to his studio and hanged himself. The tragic death of the man Breton considered one of the greatest painters in America devastated him, and it incensed him to think that his protégé, Matta, had precipitated the suicide of the man he cherished. When Matta tried to explain that he had merely followed surrealist precepts, allowing him to be guided by unconscious desires (paraphrasing Marx, Breton had proclaimed “to each according to his desires”), the usually courteous and courtly Breton, like a modern Jeremiah, shrieked, “Assassin! Murderer!” He summoned a meeting of the Surrealist circle and Matta was excommunicated from the Surrealist group for “intellectual disqualification and moral ignominy.” Character is destiny, form is inseparable from content and there is no thought without composition; the Betrothals, with or without Picasso’s influence and despite Gorky’s secret and personal temperament, were painted from his own ethical stance. Art historian Elie Faure, (renowned for his multi-volumed History of Art, 1921) had written, “It is like those voices of silence that we hear and follow in their interminable round when we listen only to ourselves.” But Gorky, “fervent scrutinizer” of works of art, also heard the “language of silent things and of flowers.” The connection between Gorky’s art and his Armenian past is difficult to untangle. Heartened by his marriage and growing family, Gorky created lush bountiful Landscapes as his personal style, and gained acceptance in the art world. Just as Guernica exemplified Picasso’s misfortunes, the Betrothals, with post-cubist matrix and organized by elegant Ingresesque lines, characterized the artist’s tragedies. “Gorky’s paintings are full of complexity,” as Reiff rightly pointed out in “The Late Works of Arshile Gorky,”[45] and restated in his Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky’s Art,[46] “Not only are the parts many, they also preserve their identities as parts and must be composed.” Details of his paintings, especially in the Betrothals, may be parsed iconographically, and the interpretations of the paintings may be incomplete, but the attempt is undoubtedly necessary. With all their hermeticisms, they are distinctly Gorkian masterworks as his art becomes part of the American tradition.
[ 1] Jacob Kainen, “Memories of Arshile Gorky” Arts, March 1976, p. 97. [2] Julien Levi, Foreword to William C. Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies, (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1962) 7. [3] Janie C. Lee and Melvin P. Lader, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Harry N Abrams, 2003, p. 63. [4] Jim M. Jordan "Arshile Gorky at Crooked Run Farm" Arts, March 1976, p.102. [5] Herschel B Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica: History, Transformation, Meanings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 101. [6] Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003, p. 421. [7] Lee and Lader, p.57. [8] W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, p.56; also J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough: The Magic Art, vol. 2 ch. 2; or as Axel W. Persson wrote: “According to the very basic principles of homeopathic magic, the phallus and the sexual act are prerequisites for the renewal of nature.” [9] Herrera, p.29. [10] David Moore, Slayers, Saviors, Servants, and Sex: An Expose of Kingdom Fungi, New York: Springer-Verlag, 2001; see also US National Fungus Collections, Beltsville MD. Earlier, [11] Herrera, p. 488. [12] Matthew Spender, New York: From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky, New York: A.A.Knopf, 1999, p. 182. [13] André Breton, “The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky,” foreword, Arshile Gorky, (New York: Julien Levy Gallery exhibition catalogs 1945 and 1948). [14] Herrera, p. 708, n. 567. [15] Robert Reiff, A Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky’s Art from 1943-1948, (New York: Garland Press, 1977), p. 104, diagram on p. 310. [16] Lee and Lader, p. 18, Fig. 1. [17] Diane Waldman, Arshile Gorky 1904-1948: A Retrospective, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981, Fig. 73. In Herrera, p. 45, as Self Portrait, Study for the Artist’s Mother. [18] Kainen (p. 96), Spender (p. 142), and Reiff (Arts, March 1976, p. 91), all quoted Greene [Balcomb Greene, typescript, January, 1951, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art files]. [19] Herschel Chipp, “Guernica: Love, War, and the Bullfight,” Art Journal, winter 1973-4, XXXIII/2: p. 100. [20] Reiff, p. 135. [21] Spender, p. 208. [22] Melvin P Lader, Arshile Gorky, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985, p. 100. [23] April Kingsley, "Gorky's Absolute Ambiguity," Re-Dact: An Anthology of Art Criticism, ed. Peter Frank, New York: Willis, Locker & Owens Publishing, 1984, p. 96. [24] Reiff, p. 161; diagrams p. 359. [25] Klaus Kertess , in Gorky’s Betrothals: Collection in Context, New York: Whitney Museum catalog, 1993, n.p. [26] Michael Auping, Arshile Gorky: the Breakthrough Years, New York & Fort Worth: Rizzoli, [27] Ethel K. Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957, p. 66 . [28] Auping, p. 57. [29] Picasso’s Guernica and related Studies are located in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. [30] Arnheim, p. 20. [31] Arnheim, p. 118. [32] Blunt, p. 39. [33] Chipp, p. 114. [34] Martin Ries, “Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur,” Art Journal, XXXII/2, winter 1972/73, p. 145. [35] Reiff, p. 99, diagram, p. 344. [36] Kertess, n.p. [37] Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky, Woodstock New York: Overlook Press, c. 2000, p. 32. [38] Herrera, p. 637, n. 18. [39] Herrera: p. 638, n. 20. [40] Matossian, p. 271 [41] Matossian, p. 187. [42] Spender: pp. 81, 272, 355. [43] Herrera, pp. 240, 258. [44] Matossian, p. 435. [45] Reiff, “The Late Works of Arshile Gorky,” Art Journal, spring 1963, xxii/3, p. 152, n. 6. [46] Robert Reiff, A Stylistic Analysis, p. 262, n 1.
This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University, The Brooklyn Center.
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