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Lot Essay
During the 1930s, the enigmatic artist Arshile Gorky produced several versions of his early masterpiece, Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia. These had begun by taking Giorgio de Chirico's 1913 painting Il tempiale mortale as a point of departure. Within Gorky's works, the portion occupied by a blackboard with diagrams in de Chirico's work became a forum for a free and increasingly abstract exploration of forms in space. This proved to be a point of liberation for Gorky, as he freed himself from the burden of direct figuration and instead created evocative yet abstract images.
The importance of this revelation for Gorky is demonstrated in works such as Two Forms (Study for Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, where he focused solely on this portion of the composition, abandoning the rest. The two forms of the title appear to straddle a strange and subliminal gap between Picasso's Cubism and Miró's deeply personal Surrealism, making the title highly apt. This is an enigma, with the finely-hatched background lending a sense of the nocturnal, while the whole is pervaded by the lyrical sense of nostalgia, of a search for the lost forms of the artist's childhood in Armenia. The forms have a strong sense of solidity, and yet remain ungraspable, unreadable, shimmering on the border of recognition. It is in keeping with this sense of mournful and atmospheric lyricism that, describing the forms in Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, Gorky commented that his inspiration had been 'wounded birds, poverty, and one whole week of rain' (quoted in M. Spender and B. Rose, Arshile Gorky and the Genesis of Abstractrion: Drawings from the Early 1930s, exh. cat., Seattle, 1994, p. 60).
The importance of this revelation for Gorky is demonstrated in works such as Two Forms (Study for Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, where he focused solely on this portion of the composition, abandoning the rest. The two forms of the title appear to straddle a strange and subliminal gap between Picasso's Cubism and Miró's deeply personal Surrealism, making the title highly apt. This is an enigma, with the finely-hatched background lending a sense of the nocturnal, while the whole is pervaded by the lyrical sense of nostalgia, of a search for the lost forms of the artist's childhood in Armenia. The forms have a strong sense of solidity, and yet remain ungraspable, unreadable, shimmering on the border of recognition. It is in keeping with this sense of mournful and atmospheric lyricism that, describing the forms in Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, Gorky commented that his inspiration had been 'wounded birds, poverty, and one whole week of rain' (quoted in M. Spender and B. Rose, Arshile Gorky and the Genesis of Abstractrion: Drawings from the Early 1930s, exh. cat., Seattle, 1994, p. 60).