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©
Arshile Gorky, (ARS), VEGAP
Arshile Gorky

Last Painting

1948
Oil on canvas.
78.6 x 101.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
564
(
1978.72
)
ROOM 46
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room

The dealer Julien Levy revealed in his monograph on Gorky that Last Painting was on the artist’s easel on the day he committed suicide in July 1948 and can therefore be considered to embody his depressed emotional state. The iconography of the painting, that sometimes has also been entitled The Black Monk, could stem from Gorky’s reaction to reading Anton Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk. Written in January 1894, it tells of the degeneration and delirium of a man to whom a menacing black monk appears and announces to him that he is a genius: “Beneath the balcony the serenade was being played, and the Black Monk whispered to him that he was a genius, and he died only because his feeble, mortal body had lost its balance, and could no longer serve as the covering of genius. ”Harry Rand took this quotation, which is stressed by Levy, to be a suicide note.

In addition to this symbolic narration, the painting displays formal characteristics of great emotional intensity. It is executed rapidly in a claustrophobic gestural style; the large patches of black appear to intimidate the biomorphic forms, which are no longer linear and delicately drawn as in previous works but gestural and aggressive. As in many of Gorky’s paintings, the compositional complexity of Last Painting and the accumulation of forms and figures that interact without losing their identity might be linked to the tradition of great Baroque painting, while the appearance of an unfinished oil painting or enlarged sketch, resulting from the manner of separating line and colour typical of his late works (which Clement Greenberg defined as “tinted drawings”), stems from the influence of Picasso, Matisse and, above all, Joan Miró. The Miró retrospective held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941 provided Gorky with the key to resolving the tension between his desire for spontaneity and his need to clarify his compositions. Although the influence of the New York-based Surrealists on Gorky’s fanciful imagery is more than proven, it was the Catalan who led him to realise that he could “draw” the essential forms in black on the canvas and then add with greater freedom a series of bright colours, applied in very thin layers and not with the thick impastos of his earlier works.

Paloma Alarcó

 

20th Centurys. XX - Expresionismo abstracto norteamericanoPaintingOilcanvas
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Last Painting. Arshile (Vosdanig Adoian) Gorky
Last Painting
Arshile Gorky

©

Arshile Gorky, (ARS), VEGAP

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Last Painting. Arshile (Vosdanig Adoian) Gorky
Last Painting
Arshile Gorky

©

Arshile Gorky, (ARS), VEGAP

Terms of Use

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