Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century.
This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape.
What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.
via: "From Mimic to Master of Invention" By Holland Cotter - The New York Times
