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Artist or Maker: Arshile Gorky (1904-1948)
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Provenance: Jeanne Reynal, New York
Julian Levy, Connecticut
Anon. sale; Sotheby's New York, 9 November 1981
Private Collection, New York
Ben Heller, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
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Exhibited: Venice, XXXI Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, Gorky Retrospective, September-October 1962, no. 68.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Arshile Gorky Drawings toured the United States, Japan, West Germany, Great Britian, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Italy, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, September 1962 -June 1968.
Arshile Gorky Drawings, Organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Traveling show, September 1962-June 1968.
London, The Arts Council of Great Britian, London, Serpentine Gallery and Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, Arshile Gorky: Paintings and Drawings, March 1976-January 1977, no. 86.
Chicago, The University of Chicago, The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, Abstract Expressionism: A Tribute to Harold Rosenberg Paintings and Drawings from Chicago Collections, October-November 1979, no. 13.
New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art; New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery and Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Collection in Context: Gorky's Betrothal's, October 1993-June 1994. New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Houston, The Menil Collection, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, November 2003-May 2004, p. 77, no. 30 (illustrated in color).
London, The Arts Council of Great Britain.
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Literature: H. Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols, Berkeley, 1980, p. 183 (illustrated).
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Notes: Executed at the peak of his creative enterprise, Betrothal captures the brief moments of personal fulfillment that seemed to elude Arshile Gorky's otherwise tragic life. Arguably the first Abstract Expressionist, his influence over the evolution of post-war American art cannot be underestimated; one can only imagine the extent of his legacy had his star not prematurely combusted.
Betrothal has been described as a "the wooing and drawing together of the sexes". As with many of his mature paintings, the artist channeled his family into the cast of characters that populated this work. Acutely wounded by his early separation from his father and the death of his mother from starvation while fleeing persecution in Armenia, Gorky seemed to search for a family to replace the one that he had lost in childhood. Even before he married Agnes Magruder in 1941, he created figural constellations filled with imaginary relatives as if drawing them would eventually render them real. His marriage and the birth of his daughters Maro in 1943 and Natasha in 1945 filled a void that a flowered into creative profusion in the mid-forties. Indeed, 1947 proved an extraordinary year that engendered twenty important paintings and over three hundred drawings.
The subject's deeply personal importance to the artist resulted in an extended development of this theme. One of the most complex images that Gorky had undertaken, Betrothal unfolded with numerous works on paper and culminated in three major oil paintings, one of which is owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Although some drawings were barely finished sketches that often related only tangentially to the paintings, the scale of the present work alone suggests its import. Its finished arrangement congested with vaguely figural forms suggests the high order of deliberation that informed its creation. Indeed, its close resemblance to the paintings suggests that it is an advanced and fully conceived study, a distinct entity in its own right. Since Gorky was in the habit of transferring drawings onto canvas, its similar size to the paintings (which measure 50 x 40 inches and 50 x 38 inches respectively) corroborates its degree of completion.
In his succession of drawings, Gorky progressively abstracted his figures until they were reduced to biomorphic traces--mysterious signs of their former selves. His method involved the sequential examination of motifs to maximize their formal efficacy and symbolic concision. If a shape required further examination, he would devote a separate study to it, refining it until it achieved the level of economy he desired. Gorky's graphic intelligence drove his visual inventiveness and enabled his progress towards organic abstraction. Devoted to tradition, the artist recognized the historical importance of drawing and relived it in the great lineage of the Florentine painters of the Renaissance through the nineteenth-century example of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres whom he admired and studied. Like an apprentice in the studio of an Old Master, Gorky schooled himself in the artistic pantheon by copying paintings that he saw in museums with rigorous discipline, gracious humility and unrelenting ambition. Surrealism's invasion into the New York art scene in the forties provided a further case for drawing via the concept of "automatic écriture", which presented Gorky another means to plumb the medium for improvised and spontaneous discoveries. The wandering fluidity of line became the source of insight for Gorky's energetic artistic excursions. Drawing represented not only a point of departure for "first thoughts", but also staged the last, allowing a forum of continuous transition and assimilation in between.
Perhaps only one step removed from the paintings, the relatively advanced and complex nature of the present work renders the interpretation of its iconography difficult. However, art historians have echoed the infiltration of Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano in this work. Gorky was extremely fond of this image, contemplating it incessantly from nearly life-sized photographs that he had tacked to his studio walls on 36 Union Square. Ethel Schwabacher suggests "one may sense allusions to the plumed helmet and spear of Uccello's riders" (cited in H. Rand, Arshile Gorky, p. 169). However, Julian Levy, the artist's friend and dealer, preferred to see a blending of Duchamp's Bride in Gorky's vision. Levy speculated that some marriage ceremony was taking place and even hinted at the presence of the bridegroom in the foreground. Indeed, this would tie in with the theme of the work without discrediting the possibility of some formal inspiration from Uccello's masterpiece having seeped in.
Harry Rand presents the most cogent deciphering of what is at hand. He identifies the lithe and elegant figure in the center as the bride, her "pronged" head turned modestly down to capture the shyness and delicacy of the situation. He suggests that perhaps the "prongs" are a wedding veil, or as in the Armenian custom where crowns are momentarily placed on the heads of the bride and groom, a small gold ceremonial headdress. Nuptials are suggested and one can imagine Gorky delineating Agnes's tall and slender form in his fictionalized recreation of their wedding, her grace evident in the spare linear delineations of her stem-like neck, twin oval breasts, elongated torso and voluptuous buttocks. Her arm, which extends from the left shoulder and bends at the elbow, reveals a single beautiful gesture is perfectly expressed by Gorky's refined articulation. At her feet, at the lower right of the drawing, a man kneels with one bent leg, face upturned towards the bride and hand raised imploringly towards hers. The figure's stylized beard, more apparent in earlier versions, suggests that it is the artist himself, in deep genuflection, a supplicant in the posture of a marriage proposal.
Other personages populate the wedding party (including the bride's father to her left and possibly her mother to her right) although most remain anonymous. Given that Gorky married far from home with neither family nor friends preset, Betrothal is not an autobiographical account but a romantic retelling of how he may have envisioned his marital union. Exquisitely delineated through the sinuous poetry of line, internally lit with subtle charcoal shadows and perfumed by the sparest hint of color, the present work attests to one of the artist's happiest respites from his haunted existence. In art there was triumph that in life there was not and the present work stands witness to Gorky's lasting achievement.
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