Lot 9 Nα

In 1941 Arshile Gorky became one of the first artists in America to begin working with the European surrealists’ technique of “écriture automatique”. Other painters like Willem de Kooning followed his example from the mid-1940s.
Until his early death in 1948, Gorky attempted to use this technique for converting the unconscious into an image to come to terms with his extremely emotionally charged memories of his native Armenia. His initially idyllic childhood in Armenia was extinguished by the systematic persecution, deportation and killing of the Armenian populace through the Ottoman military which began in 1915. His family was torn apart and his mother died as a refugee; the young Gorky succeeded in emigrating to the US with one of his sisters.
His intensive nature studies of plants and animals represent an additional thematic complex that is fundamental to his work and is of a completely different character. These combine into biomorphic forms in his paintings and drawings and become unified with his visualisations of his traumatic memories. “The linear elements, spontaneously doodled, seem to meander, and the color areas are fluid and spill over the surface. As if possessed by memories and psychic pressures, Gorky improvised abstract amalgams of human, animal, and plant parts, a new order of ‘hybrid’ organisms, as Breton characterized them. […] Gorky was the first American avant-garde painter to recognize that ‘the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism’, as Adolph Gottlieb observed, and that ‘out of these opposites something new could emerge’” (Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: a Reevaluation, Lenox/New York 2009, p. 76).
As is rendered strikingly clear by the two drawings made available here, Arshile Gorky’s profoundly personal works contain dramatic as well as poetic elements and possess a balanced compositional beauty in spite of the largely spontaneous and unplanned action of their drawing.