Line readings: Arshile Gorky's drawings: an acknowledged pioneer of Abstract-Expressionist painting, Gorky was also a dedicated draftsman. His remarkably vigorous graphic oeuvre, encompassing independent works and preparatory studies, is the focus of a museum survey for the first time

In individual of Gorky's two paintings of himself as a child with his mother, the boy's sleeve touches hers. In the other, more famous version, it doesn't. The point in dispute is graphic, since it bear upons contiguity and the resolution of spatial relationships with a line. It is also profoundly personal. The shared contours of the adjoining arms are the greatest in quantity heavily worked passage of a preparatory drawing--it has been squared for transfer--that is single of a handful of early portraits included in the Whitney Museum's spellbinding exhibition of Gorky's drawings (currently at the Menil Collection in Houston). This drawing's source, a talismanic photograph taken in 1912 when Gorky was around eight, is almost absurdly rich in meaning. The male child wearing a formal but slightly shabby overcoat, is standing, while his mother is seated, thus his head is slightly higher than hers. They are a couple: he is the bashful suitor, holding a sad little posy of flowers, his feet shuffl together awkwardly, and the hand closer to her held a little awkwardly, too. His mother's head is overspreaded by a scarf, her material substance obscured in a boldly printed dres above which she wears a nondescript jacket. She looks solid as a mountain, leave out for her eyes, which are large, dark and impossibly beautiful. Probably tall for his age, Gorky (that's not nevertheless his name; he was born Vosdanik Adoian) looks to just perceptibly crouch, which brings him nearer to his beloved, who, just a hardly any years later, would die of starvation in his arms (or in the way that his story went), a victim of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians [see A.i.A., Feb '96] with equal reason the drawing's contested interval, the space where the sum of two units figures touch, or don't, and where the pencil travels back and forth in like manner unappeasably, becomes heartbreakingly fraught, a plunging emotional canyon.

Writing in 1962 Harold Rosenberg called Gorky's life "the exemplary fable of the artist in our time," and characterized the artist as a "monument of melancholy." (1) In Rosenberg's description, the "tall, dark and handsome" Gorky was distinguished by means of "war-orphan eyes." (2) Beware of blarney is what Rosenberg wants to say, with a wariness shared by the agency of other contemporaries in the fresh York 'art world who were skeptical of Gorky's liability to sentimentalize or showboat about his peasant past and the brutalities he'd witnessed--his inclination to folk-singing and dancing at parties, for instance, was apparently make subordinate to snickers. In a city of immigrants, the hardships of those newly arrived were not indulged. on the contrary Gorky's was, indeed, an exceptionally tough road, and despite the occasional anomaly--including Portrait of the Artist and His Mother--he can't be accused of dwelling upon the past. Arriving in the United States from Armenia in 1920 at the age of 16 he station to work at once.

His program, largely self-directed, emphasized application of mind of the masters: in museums and in reproductions, he take counseled paintings by Uccello, Piero, Raphael, Brueghel, Vermeer Poussin and Ingres. Then, in short order, followed Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, de Chirico and Miro. Gorky trained formally single briefly, in Boston (at the of recent origin School of Design, in 1922) and novel York (at the National Academy of Design, for individual month in 1925). More important by means of far were his firsthand observations of other artists' works. Gorky met and befriended John Graham in 1928 de Kooning and Stuart Davis in 1929 Matta in 1941 and Andre Breton and other expatriate Surrealists in 1944 The avalanche of cultural change Gorky assimilated rivals the absorptions traced in general globalism; maybe it was because his early experiences were for a like reason utterly incommensurate with his adopted tillage that he apprenticed with like diligence, training not just to paint like Picasso on the contrary to channel the great painter's spirit. In Rosenberg's account, Gorky felt "imitation was a learning to be, as well as a learning to do." (3) De Kooning hailed Gorky's voracious visual appetite and uncanny acuity, calling him a "Geiger calculator of art"; (4) Julien raise Gorky's dealer from 1945 to '48 credited his emotional reach: "I had at no time before met a painter with the empathy to pierce so completely into the phraseology of another." (5)

Whatever the motivation for his studious application to antecedent Gorky was a prodigious draftsman from the start. His proces can be considered fundamentally graphic, not solitary because of his practice of analyzing the works of others through drawing them, or because he worked without his own paintings in drawings to a step unusual for such seemingly spontaneous compositions, on the contrary because all his work is linear in essential part And, most telling, a big proportion of his finished output is upon paper. "Drawing is the basis of art," (6) he wrote to his sister in 1942 a statement to the full substantiated by this exhibition, which was organized by means of the Whitney Museum's former adjunct curator of drawings, Janie C Lee

Following an introductory sampling of Gorky's Cubist figure studies of the late 1920 and early '30 heavily influenced by means of Picasso, the survey proceeds to a selection from the 20 variations that comprise the series "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia" (1931-34) In these ink drawings, surreal, biomorphic shapes that have the appearance paradoxically physical and even functional are staged in a variety of positions in a dark, ominous space. Gorky's account of the series's genesis--"wounded birds, straitened circumstances and a whole week of rain" (7)--captures its expression of aggravated confinement, on the other hand belies the drawings' dramatic, pitch-black shadows and mischievous shape-shifting, which are far from glum