InternationalThe Arshile Gorky exhibit in Yerevan
by Gregory Lima
Published: Thursday October 01, 2009 in Cafesjian Center for the Arts
Untitled, 1931, pencil on paper, 33 x 27 cm. An embryonic figure holding a package seems to be emerging from Gorky's pencil, mundane and yet mysterious. Gorky would often make dozens of exploratory sketches in developing an idea. Arshile Gorky / Gerard L. Cafesjian Collection
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Yerevan - Part of the visible legacy of Arshile Gorky, born Manoog Adoian, came back to Yerevan this week in 23 carefully wrapped packages.
Gorky as a child with his mother and sisters had found difficult refuge here with hundreds of thousands of others upon fleeing their homes and livelihoods in Western Armenia during the Turkish atrocities of the Genocide. For a time during their years here, before his mother died of starvation, they lived in a modest house off what is now Abovian Street.
In his years in Yerevan and its outskirts, between 1915 and 1920, the tumultuous years of war, famine, and the struggle for survival of a young republic, he took whatever jobs he could find as a young boy to earn food for his family, learning practical trades, sometimes working day and night. He left as an adolescent artisan. He returns as one of the major artists of the 20th century.
In the soon-to-be-opened Cafesjian Center for the Arts, there will be a small Gorky exhibition. The great strength of the Cafesjian Collection lies in three-dimensional contemporary art of major international stature. But the small collection of Gorky's work is nevertheless important. While it contains none of the celebrated masterpieces, it is a firm and good beginning for an understanding of Gorky's development through his various phases to surrealism and the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism. No doubt through later borrowings, loans, and acquisitions by the new Center for the Arts, we will see more of Gorky.
Nevertheless what will soon be seen by the public here is a well chosen, excellent beginning. As the 23 packages were opened for placement in the Eagle Room on a high level of Yerevan's Cascade, which has been transformed into the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, I personally felt this was a truly historic moment. Gorky is back and he is strong. It was as if a good part of what he had done in America was in the paintings and drawings that were being revealed in Yerevan for the first time.
