Gorky Quotes
I met him [Arshile Gorky] in 1929. Of course I met a lot of artists, but then I met Gorky. Well I had some training in Holland, quite a training, you know, The Academy. And then I met Gorky [in New York], who didn't have that at all, he became from no place [Tiflis, Armenia]... And for some mysterious reason, he knew lots more about painting, and art, he just knew it by nature - things I was supposed to know and feel and understand - he really did it better. He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head, very remarkable, so I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends.
Willem de Kooning
When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary to make sure of where things and people came from, well then, I came from 36 Union Square [address of the studio of Gorky that time]... I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence.
Willem de Kooning
I have to go away, but with regrets and with the firm intention to come back soon. I consider most sound I am an individual Gorky – and it is my individual feeling which counts for the most. Why? I do not know nor do I wish to know. I accept it as a fact, which does not need explanation.
Arshile Gorky
As for a few others, the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism. Out of these opposites something new could emerge, and Gorky's work is a part of the evidence that this is true. What he felt, I suppose, was a sense of polarity, not of dichotomy; that opposites could exist simultaneously within a body, within a painting or within an entire art.. .These are the opposites poles in his work. Logic and irrationality; violence and gentleness; happiness and sadness, surrealism and abstraction. Out of these elements I think Gorky evolved his style.
Adolph Gottlieb
[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.
Phillip Guston
I was overjoyed when I was taken to a show of the American Abstract Artists Group in '37. They were all alive and they were American! My escort further interested me when he told me the two best abstract artists in America were not in the show - Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, whom I met a couple of months later - when I began to study with him [with Willem de Kooning]. When Miss Nochlin says, 'What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history,' well, the point is, artists are always choosing their history from day to day and their history follows them as much as it precedes them. Were American artists 'facing up to the reality of their history' when they turned to the School of Paris or to German Expressionism or Dada or Surrealism or de Stijl or the Bauhaus instead of to Copley, Peale, Eakins, Blake or Ryder; was Picasso facing up to the reality of his history when he was snooping around African art for inspiration?
Elaine de Kooning
I say that the eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror – even if the water of that mirror offers some interesting peculiarities.... that eye impresses me as no less dead than the eye of a slaughtered steer if it has only the capacity to reflect – what if it reflects the object in one or in many aspects, in repose or in motion, in waking or in dream? The treasure of the eye is elsewhere! Most artists are still for tuning around the hands of the clock.... without having the slightest concern for the spring hidden in the opaque case. The eye-spring.... Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret have been completely revealed.
André Breton
In short it is my concern to emphasize that Gorky is, of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sit down to paint before her. Furthermore, it is out of the question that he would take the expression of this nature as an end in itself – rightly he demands of her that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind... Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life, in the discovery of the very rhythm of life.
André Breton
And I was painting and changing and developing and going through [c. 1950-52] that bridge from early Kandinsky and Gorky to my own [painting] thing. And just soaking up [Willem] de Kooning and [Jackson] Pollock... So I had the place to myself. And while Bill [= Willem] and Elaine [de Kooning] and Charlie [Egan] and such would maybe come to my studio, there was no thought,.... of my going in with those four or five young ones.
Helen Frankenthaler