Arshile Gorky: Evolution of the Modern Avant-Gardist
ART11-10-Wed2
Robert Solomon
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
March 12 - May 21 (No Class April 16)
This course will take us from Vostanig Adoian’s idyllic childhood in the Armenian/Kurdish province of Van, to his family’s displacement during the
Armeninan genocide, a period of systematic extermination that would impact the trajectory of Arshile Gorky’s work over the final 24 years of his tragically foreshortened life. Vostanig emigrated to Watertown MA in 1920 and moved to New York in 1924, where he began using the pseudonym “Arshile Gorky.” We’ll speculate about Gorky’s identity change reasoning while we examine his autodidactic methodology for studying, absorbing, and sketching the European modernists, including Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, George Braque, and Pablo Picasso. Our readings will generate discussion about the influential relationships Gorky established with his first patron, Philadelphia collector Bernard Davis, and artists John Graham, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Chilean painter Roberto Matta, and André Breton, author of Manifesto of Surrealism. The Matta connection, especially, would prove intense and ultimately even deadly.
By the mid-1940s Gorky’s highly original abstractions, combined “memories of his Armenian childhood with Surrealist fantasies” that resulted in “works characterized by billowing shapes and exotic colors.” As we view Gorky’s final portfolio, we’ll discuss the circumstances of his tragic death and assess why art historian Kim Theriault called Arshile Gorky “the single most important segue between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism.” In our last class, we’ll look at Gorky’s influence on the next generation; specifically at surrealist/abstractionist Joseph Stapleton (1921-1994) who met Gorky in the WPA program in the late 1930s.
Roughly the same amount of lecture and discussion.
William Chapin Seitz, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies
Doubleday, 1962 $2.99 at Amazon (paperback)
Peter Balakian, “Arshile Gorky and the Armenian Genocide”, Art in America, February, 1996, pp. 58-67, 108-109 (link will be provided by SGL)
André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924 (link will be provided by SGL)
Links to additional readings and other materials will be posted on the weekly assignments pages on the class website.
2 hours
Robert Solomon, an independent art historian specializing in Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the New York School, is the right holder to the Joseph F. Stapleton Drawing Collection. The Collection donates Joseph Stapleton’s work to academic art museums. Solomon studied with Stapleton (1921-1994) at Pratt in the early 1970s and was mentored by the artist into the mid-1980s. Solomon, who holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Tufts, is presently writing Joseph Stapleton’s authorized biography. This is Solomon’s second BOLLI course. He was the SGL for the course “Mark Rothko and the Spirituality in Art” in Fall 2024.