ABSTRACT
Arshile Gorky's art was a bridge between two worlds, joining the Cubism and Surrealism of the School of Paris to the new modes of abstraction of the New York School. In every exhibition of Gorky's work, one cannot help being aware of its overwhelming quality, and yet one's awareness of this quality does little either to inhibit or to satisfy our curiosity about the exact nature of his artistic identity. It is impossible to appreciate what Gorky's profound response to Surrealism represented in the development of his art–the kind of threat, mystery, and opportunity that Surrealism posed for an artist of his temperament and culture–without an understanding of this fundamentally classical bias. Even then, of course, Gorky was not free of the discipleship to which his art always remained attached, only now it was from Joan Miro, Malta, and Andre Masson that he derived many of the constituent forms of his new language.
