.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Extoling an elegance and visual forcefulness, Virginia Pastel is one of Arshile Gorky’s seminal late abstractions. Central to both the artist’s personal vernacular and to the broader development of postwar art, the present work foretells Abstract Expressionism’s nascent emergence. Produced at a significant moment in Gorky’s life, Virginia Pastel shows a close-up, abstracted view of the natural landscape most likely situated around Crooked Run, his wife’s family farm in Virginia. Here, immersed within nature, Gorky delighted in returning to the earth after leaving the urban environment of New York, which had provided intellectual nourishment but had also stifled his creativity. The present work shows an abstracted view of flowers and grass viewed closely against a moving blue sky. The work’s overall effect merges the intellect with the experience of nature, with André Breton describing the artist “giving [himself] up to the depicted subject until a kind of match is made where artist and subject and art are one” (quoted in J.C. Lee, “Arshile Gorky: The Power of Drawing” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003, p. 63).
Working from sketches made en plein air, Gorky translates these observations into an imaginative overview of the preparatory images, flattening the perspective onto the two-dimensional picture plane and weaving positive and negative space together to suggest a spatial penetration into the support. Flowers and imaginative vegetation take shape through economically drawn lines, some confidently sketched in one pass, as seen particularly in the leftmost and upward elements, and others vigorously outlined in graphite and ink to create bold black lines cutting through the colorful field. Gorky likewise alternates and experiments with his pigments, in some parts lightly rubbing crayon against the paper grain to integrate color into the support, and in others passionately providing passages of densely worked polychrome flush with intermediate color; exemplary is the sky at the top right and the use of deep azure and violet pigment blended against a blue crayon base, creating a composition pulsing with energy.
Gorky assimilates the breadth of art history into this engaging and innovative composition, employing his prolonged study across the span of the art historical canon, running from Old Masters, including Bruegel, Paolo Uccello, Vermeer, Raphael, Piero della Francesca, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, to modern innovators such as Paul Cezanne and the experimental Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The artist saw modern art and abstraction as a continuous progression of the past, rather than a break with tradition. Gorky not only studied but practiced the lessons of his predecessors at each phase of his artistic career, stopping to master each period’s language before moving on to the next. Moving stylistically from neoclassicism through Impressionism to Cezanne and onto Cubism, this consistent development is best demonstrated in his drawings, with Virginia Pastel representing the culmination of his decades of practice and one of the first revelations of his new abstracted idiom.
Gorky’s lines delineating space are executed with a muscular confidence, demonstrating his masterful draftsmanship learned from these decades of study. The artist’s sensitivity to line and mark making allow his black delineations to hold a rhythmic and almost arabesque calligraphic sensitivity, which the scholar of Abstract Expressionism David Anfam attributes to the artist’s interest in Armenian medieval manuscript illuminations. Gorky contrasts his linear elements—emerging from his dalliance with surrealist automatism—with the natural movements of his colorful forms, implicating his intellectual artistic conceptions within the overall organic composition. The artist learned from Leonardo da Vinci the notion of line as the prime conceptualization of the intellect, with the Florentine artist writing, “the line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object and this being its nature it occupies no space” (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. J.P. Richter, London, 1880, p. 47). Gorky’s influential innovation is to treat negative space as a form equivalent to positive space, establishing a spatially unified compositional arrangement wherein the bare areas of the paper are as potent as the most heavily worked passages.
Strikingly contemporary in appearance, Gorky remains committed to traditional compositional structures, his ingenious swelling, rounded forms collapsing into curving and folding panes within an implied grid. The artist’s metamorphosing of his acute observation of the natural world into a sensuous experience of abstract shapes and organic forms fulsomely demonstrates why Gorky has often been described as the father of Abstract Expressionism. Janie C. Lee aptly notes that “the works of Gorky’s maturity were so original that there were few who could comprehend and appreciate his achievement in his own lifetime,” yet his powerful influence continues to be felt across the great breadth of twentieth and twenty-first century art (exh. cat., op. cit., 2003, p. 13).
Working from sketches made en plein air, Gorky translates these observations into an imaginative overview of the preparatory images, flattening the perspective onto the two-dimensional picture plane and weaving positive and negative space together to suggest a spatial penetration into the support. Flowers and imaginative vegetation take shape through economically drawn lines, some confidently sketched in one pass, as seen particularly in the leftmost and upward elements, and others vigorously outlined in graphite and ink to create bold black lines cutting through the colorful field. Gorky likewise alternates and experiments with his pigments, in some parts lightly rubbing crayon against the paper grain to integrate color into the support, and in others passionately providing passages of densely worked polychrome flush with intermediate color; exemplary is the sky at the top right and the use of deep azure and violet pigment blended against a blue crayon base, creating a composition pulsing with energy.
Gorky assimilates the breadth of art history into this engaging and innovative composition, employing his prolonged study across the span of the art historical canon, running from Old Masters, including Bruegel, Paolo Uccello, Vermeer, Raphael, Piero della Francesca, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, to modern innovators such as Paul Cezanne and the experimental Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The artist saw modern art and abstraction as a continuous progression of the past, rather than a break with tradition. Gorky not only studied but practiced the lessons of his predecessors at each phase of his artistic career, stopping to master each period’s language before moving on to the next. Moving stylistically from neoclassicism through Impressionism to Cezanne and onto Cubism, this consistent development is best demonstrated in his drawings, with Virginia Pastel representing the culmination of his decades of practice and one of the first revelations of his new abstracted idiom.
Gorky’s lines delineating space are executed with a muscular confidence, demonstrating his masterful draftsmanship learned from these decades of study. The artist’s sensitivity to line and mark making allow his black delineations to hold a rhythmic and almost arabesque calligraphic sensitivity, which the scholar of Abstract Expressionism David Anfam attributes to the artist’s interest in Armenian medieval manuscript illuminations. Gorky contrasts his linear elements—emerging from his dalliance with surrealist automatism—with the natural movements of his colorful forms, implicating his intellectual artistic conceptions within the overall organic composition. The artist learned from Leonardo da Vinci the notion of line as the prime conceptualization of the intellect, with the Florentine artist writing, “the line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object and this being its nature it occupies no space” (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. J.P. Richter, London, 1880, p. 47). Gorky’s influential innovation is to treat negative space as a form equivalent to positive space, establishing a spatially unified compositional arrangement wherein the bare areas of the paper are as potent as the most heavily worked passages.
Strikingly contemporary in appearance, Gorky remains committed to traditional compositional structures, his ingenious swelling, rounded forms collapsing into curving and folding panes within an implied grid. The artist’s metamorphosing of his acute observation of the natural world into a sensuous experience of abstract shapes and organic forms fulsomely demonstrates why Gorky has often been described as the father of Abstract Expressionism. Janie C. Lee aptly notes that “the works of Gorky’s maturity were so original that there were few who could comprehend and appreciate his achievement in his own lifetime,” yet his powerful influence continues to be felt across the great breadth of twentieth and twenty-first century art (exh. cat., op. cit., 2003, p. 13).