Arshile Gorky Retrospective at Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted the first major retrospective of Arshile Gorky since 1981, from October 21, 2009 to January 10, 2010. Organized by Michael Taylor, the exhibition featured 180 paintings and works on paper, making it the largest and most comprehensive presentation of the artist's oeuvre to date. Gorky, born in 1902 to an Armenian family, experienced displacement and deportation by Turks as a refugee, which influenced his career. He arrived in the United States, studied art in Boston, and settled in New York. The retrospective highlighted Gorky's pivotal role in shifting abstract painting in the early 1940s, moving from automatic surrealism to a lyrical, chromatic, and gestural style. His friendships, particularly with de Kooning, and his intuitive grasp of color allowed him to approach art as a universal language. Works from 1942-1944, such as Waterfall and The Liver is the Cock's Comb, demonstrate intelligence and sensitivity, offering a respite from the distancing rhetoric of contemporary art auctions. The exhibition balanced works from different periods, allowing reassessment of pieces like Composition with Head and Enigmatic Combat (1936-37), previously seen as derivative of Picasso, now revealing Gorky's revolutionary identity.