The Late Works of Arshile Gorky

Abstract

In 1943, when Gorky was 38, those paintings and drawings of his which qualify him to join the best of this country's most distinguished artists began to appear. He died in July, 1948. The special contribution which these late works make cannot be isolated like some precious ingredient but must be measured by the total performance of an individual picture because Gorky is a synthesizer and not an innovator. If anything, he appears to be concluding a phase of development rather than instigating a new way of seeing.1 What he synthesizes, that is to say, the combination of influences and the manner in which he wields them, accounts for the originality of his work. Originality is fundamentally a by-product as far as Gorky is concerned. He fused what appear to be opposites, Cubist discipline with surrealist fantasy and release. He did this, not as part of a consciously conceived program, but to fulfill an unconscious, inner need, which made itself evident to the artist first as gnawing discontent and then as a ...