The Liver is The Cock's Comb - Arshile Gorky
On the verge of the outbreak of the second world war, in a world shaken by conflicts and economic crisis, the two major exhibitions presented by the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 - 7 ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ and ‘Fantastic Art Dada, Surrealism’; were somehow bound to have a huge impact on the young generation of artists that were established in New York. What drew them in were the simple geometrical shapes, the interlacing planes, the flat, two dimensional aspect of the picture plane of the cubist paintings; but surrealism was to have the decisive influence on the young artists, with its absurd placement of images , through techniques such as ‘ecriture automatique’ and a huge desire to let free the creative flow come from the unconscious. From this point onwards the dynamic of the paint became more and more important in the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, who were ‘born’ and ‘educated’ by the Regionalism and and Social Realism trends of the late 1920s early 1930s.
In the catalogue 1936 ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ in 1936, author Alfred Barr was somehow prophesying for the artists who were to attract increasing attention as the ‘New York School’, by writing “The second - and, until recently, secondary - current , has its principal source in the art and theories of Gauguin and his circle, flows through the Fauvisme of Matisse to the Abstract Expressionism of the pre-war paintings of Kandinsky. After running under ground for a few years it reappears vigorously among the masters of abstract art associated with Surrealism. This tradition, by contrast with the first, is intuitive and emotional rather than intellectual; organic and biomorphic rather than geometrical in its form; curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural, and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational"
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Some of this artists who gave in to a new, and extremely influential, artistic wave, were Arshile Gorky and William de Kooning, different artists with different approaches but somehow resembling one another in style. In discussing their work, I will be searching to compare and contrast their work and evaluate their influence on other artists.
William De Kooning’s works that were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 caused a major sensation, mainly because his paintings were figurative when most of his colleagues Abstract Expressionists were still painting abstractly, but also because his images were lacking subtlety. His paintings are characterised by violent brushstrokes and high key colours carefully positioned.
In the painting ‘Excavation’, one of the first large scale paintings of the period; De Kooning aimed to alter forms that resembled living organisms into a single endless composition. A 6 ft by 8 ft was created in 1950; with a white coloration that seems to have been removed which make it look like a wall filled with strange graffiti. Cubist influences in William De Kooning’s ‘Excavation’ can be easily notice, through the use of shapes and geometrical forms , the brush strokes seem to repeat themselves over and over again, and the result is a very effective pattern. His choice of colour reduces to blacks and placing random spots of red and yellow, the entire painting is light coloured without a striking and vibrant quality. This entire composition help undoubtedly to form, somehow, in the viewer’s eyes the gruesome image of a so called excavation of a common graveyard
.Thus it gives the impression it is a historic find, an evidence to a human catastrophe, maybe resembling the common graveyards of the Holocaust, reminding us of the atrocities. ‘Excavation’ is an important piece in establishing Abstract Expressionism’s role as the most important style of its time.
Elaine Fried, married William de Kooning in 1943, after being one of his pupils, she was best known as an art critic, or simply, as Mrs. de Kooning, in spite of being an exceptional painter herself and most probably influenced in her works by her husband.
Arshile Gorky , was a good friend of William De Kooning, sharing a studio together, De Kooning admitted several times that Arshile had a great artistic impact on him: “He knew Lots more about painting and art... He had an uncanny instinct for all art... an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head.”, “I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence”
, he was writing in a loyal reproof to an editor just a few months after Gorky tragically killed himself.
Arshile was without doubt a groundbreaking figure of Abstract Expressionism. Influenced in the early stages of his work by impressionism and postimpressionism.
Both Arshile Gorky and William De Kooning were commissioned to work for the President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s works Progress Administration which has instituted the Federal Arts Project in 1935 in order to help artists overcome economic difficulties.
De Kooning was one of the founder members of the artist association known as the Eighth Street Club, formed in 1949 together with Charles Egan , Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt. This group’s desire was to strengthen the idea that America was creating an art of universal significance
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At the highest point of his career, emerging from the influence of Cezanne and Picasso, Gorky succeeded in getting out his individual style through his painting ‘The liver is the Cock’s Comb’.
Gorky’s ‘The Liver is the Cock’s Comb’ - lacks the shapes and lines from De Kooning’s paintings, everything being much more fluid, the colours are much more striking , he uses red, orange and yellow. ‘An abstract landscape filled with watery plumes of semi-transparent colour that coalesce around spiky, thorn like shapes, painted in thin, sharp black lines, as if to suggest beaks and claws’
. Apparently in ancient texts the liver is often referred to being the centre of passion, instead of the hart
. The ‘cock’s comb’ is both a reference to judgement and body. Andre Breton, french writer, poet, theorist and main founder of Surrealism, was very sure when he declared this painting to be “one of the most important paintings made in America”
, remains a brilliant mixture of multiple origins.
Mark Rothko, a student of Arshile Gorky at the New School of Design in Boston, thought of him as being bossy, but not far-fetched tacking in consideration his precious knowledge of Cezanne and Picasso; “being able to paint apples and pears a la Cezanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso’s statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit”
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William De Kooning’s paintings are filled with shapes and repetitive lines, brush strokes, Gorky’s paintings are more vibrant in colour and the same as De Kooning’s paintings they rely solely on shapes but not the same defined, sketched forms, the outline of Gorky’s painted shapes has round edges.
Their paintings have no uniform stylistic attribute: de Kooning paints with an apparent uncontrolled and random spontaneity, while Gorky puts more serious self discipline, memories and emotions.
The “Action Painting” term was first used by New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg in order to define De Kooning’s violent ‘incisions’ of colour and the movement of the background, De Kooning once stated : “I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It does not matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity”
. Gorky, the last Surrealist or maybe the first Abstract Expressionist, adopts a more mysterious, floating, myth style in his paintings : “I do not paint in front of nature; but from within nature”
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Art critics, like Greenberg underlined in 1960, the international success of Abstract Expressionists as an artist-group; obviously as part of this group two of the major names were Gorky and De Kooning; “An older generation of major [artists] [...] may have made America painting exportable in the first place”
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At the end of the 50’s a need for a change in the artistic style of the last decade was ‘lurking’ around. A lot of questions started to arise, and the Abstract Expressionism was threatening to become academic, the Abstract Expressionists, who highly influenced the coming generation of artists were now asked, like de Kooning was asked in 1953, by the painter Robert Rauschenberg, for a drawing which could be erased and presented as an ‘original’, this was an early attempt for a breakthrough into a new creative process and a new aesthetic.
Without doubt the valuable works of Arshile Gorky, William de Kooning together with other fellow Abstract Expressionist painters like the famous Jackson Pollock; helped ‘to give birth’ ,through its aggressive , free, paint dripping, shapes and lines technique; to a new successful movement in the 1960: Pop Art. To give just a few examples of works that were directly inspired by the Abstract Expressionist paintings: Andy Worhol’s Piss Paintings (1961); Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch!, Roy Lichtenstein’s series of Brushstrokes, and the list can continue.
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