Arshile Gorky Quotes (32 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Arshile Gorky: 32 quotes3 likes

Famous Arshile Gorky Quotes

“You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: posthumous, Movements in art since 1945, p. 15: (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 12)

“.. poor art for poor people [his critic on social realism art in America]”

Arshile Gorky

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 6

“My sweet, I do not mean to upset you in writing this, but I want to tell you that within us, as within the nature of every person's soul there is an emptiness and we constantly seek to find that and those in order to escape from being alone. This always has been so, and always the weight of loneliness is with us, and for this reason we think of this thing or that so as not to be left alone.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 132: in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, after Mai 1938

“Stuart Davis.... is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.... two-dimensional surface plane.”

Arshile Gorky

In 'Stuart Davis', Arshile Gorky, in 'Creative Art 9', September 1931, p. 213
1930 - 1941

“I love Mougouch [Gorky's wife]. What about papa Cézanne... I like the wheat fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. And bread above all. My lever is such with the purple... About 194 feet away from our house [In Armenia] on the road to the spring my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit... This garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment' and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rocks. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree..”

Arshile Gorky

quote in 1942
1942 - 1948
Source: text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series, 26 June 1942

“That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations... In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.”

Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Arshile Gorky Quotes about painting

“Dear Dorothy, my biography is very short [asked for by the MOMA].... I was born in Tiflis, Caucacus, South Russia, October 25th, 1904 and after the usual studies I came to America in 1920. I had been painting steadily since I was seven and continued to do so during my three and a half years at Brown University where I studied engineering. In 1925 I came to New York and taught at the Grand Central Art School for seven years. I have been living and working ever since in New York.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 163: in a letter to Dorothy Miller, [at the staff on MOMA, New York], 26 June 1942

“About a hundred and ninety-four feet away from our house [Gorky was born in Armenia] on the road to the spring, my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots, and porcupines had made their nests. There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of w:Paolo Ucello's painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking out their soft breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above this all stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold, and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don't know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through many years of the same ac, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h—h-sh—h of silver leaves of the poplars.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 124, (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 22,23

“Subject…. no specific scene but many incidents. – The first word I spoke was Argula – it has no meaning. I was then five years old. Thus I called this painting 'Argula' as I was entering a new period closer to my instincts.
(Technique..:) Hundreds and hundreds of layers of paint to obtain the weight of reality – Art this period I measured by weight. [mid 1930's]”

Arshile Gorky

in his reply to Questionnaires of the MOMA museum, 1941
Gorky's quote refers on his multi-layered painting technique Gorky applied those days
1930 - 1941

“Delacroix spoke of the Greek coin being built from the center out. Vermeer has painted in this way, according to the principles of mass... How beautifully they are drawn – Vermeer does not just make a leaf and place it in the design, he relates space and leaf. [in the painting of Vermeer: 'Allegory on the New Testament']. That drapery – it is abstract – observe how this shape [a space between a shepherd and the tree] curves around the center space while the tree counter-curves opposite it, cutting an egg shape.... the spaces on the carpet that carry no figuration are, in fact, shapes of vital importance in building the whole..”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 357: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

“The oldest girl [his daughter Maro, four and a half years old] did this. She paints like a little bird. And this, the young one [Natasha, two and a half] did. See, she paints on both sides of the canvas. She is more like a passionate plumber. I wish I could paint as freely as they do. There is a gravity of playfulness in their work. If they could only keep it – but they will lose it as they grow older.”

Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

“It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint. – so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.”

Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Arshile Gorky Quotes about art

“.. it was the Cubist painters who created the new magic of space and color that everywhere today confronts our eyes in new architecture and design. Since then the various branches of modern art through exhaustive experiment and research have created a vast laboratory whose discoveries unveiled for all the secrets of form, line and color..”

Arshile Gorky

Quote from Gorky's text: 'Camouflage', 1942; an announcement for a teaching program [set up by Gorky and the director of the Grand Central School of Art, Edmund Greasen]
1942 - 1948

“The Persian art is great, I feel compelled to tell you this my Mouguch [pet name for his wife], because it pleases me so much. I adore those sick and lovely Persian – civilization which reveals there ancient custom's to me, which is deeply impregnated with my own.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 356: in a letter to his wife Mougouch Gorky, late Summer 1947

“Art comes instinctively to us, but it is so uncertain. I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 168: in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 7 Mai 1941

“Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 64, in an unpublished letter of Gorky

“They [the critics] forget that while the artist never works outside his time yet his art will go on to be merged gradually into the new art of a new age. There will be no short stop. We shall not, contrary to the expectation of these people, hear of the sudden death of Cubism, abstraction, so-called modern art.... if they could but realize that energy is a spiritual movement and that they must conceive of working under a law of universal aesthetic progress, as we do in science, in mathematics, in physics.”

Arshile Gorky

Quote from: 'Stuart Davis', Arshile Gorky, in 'Creative Art 9', September 1931
1930 - 1941

“The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.”

Arshile Gorky

quote in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, 2005, p. 10
posthumous

Arshile Gorky Quotes

“Rimbaud has epitomized for me the true function of the artist when he wrote: 'The poet should define the quantity of the unknown which awakes in his time, in the universal soul. He should give more than the formula of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward progress. The enormous becoming the normal, when absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplication of progress.”

Arshile Gorky

Quote of Gorky, in his text 'My murals for the Newark Airport: an interpretation', Arshile Gorky, 1936
1930 - 1941

“I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso”

Arshile Gorky

Source: posthumous, Movements in art since 1945, p. 31: (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28)

“I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water. I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres, the drawings and sketches for paintings of Seurat and that man [=Pablo Picasso ]. I measure all things by weight.”

Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948
Source: text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series, 26 June 1942

“These days a very melancholic mood has taken hold of me. There is nothing else but my work. My dear ones, I have been well and I have been working and my way of working is changing. For this reason I always feel extremely anxious. I am not content and perhaps I will not (ever) be satisfied with my work, not even for one day. I want to attain works which are more personal and clean.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 125: Gorky's quote, in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, 28 February 1938

“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

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 170: Gorky's quote in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 31 Mai 1941

“[speaking about a Persian rug…] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 359: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

“I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water.... I like the wheat-fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all.”

Arshile Gorky

1942
Source: posthumous, Movements in art since 1945, p. 31: (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28)

“It is true – is it not – that even Ingres [French classical painter, famous for his line] had to revise – yes, the surface of the painting is smooth, finished and incorruptible as a diamond, but under the accomplished surface are pentimenti – see there at the shoulder, how the line of the black dress was lowered qua fraction and the hand was extended to give greater elegance... Are these not signs of the patient revision that even a genius has to make.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 358: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

“I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.”

Arshile Gorky

quote of 1948
1942 - 1948
Source: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

“An epidemic of destruction sweeps the world today. The mind of civilized man is set to stop it. What the enemy would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze this vision is the role of camouflage. Here the artist and more particularly the modern artist can fulfill a vital function for opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation. Historically, it has been the artist's role to make manifest the beautiful inherent in all the objects of nature and man. In the study of the object, as a thing seen, he has acquired a profound understanding and sensibility concerning its visual aspects..”

Arshile Gorky

Gorky's quote refers to the heavy swift in modern art because of the appearance of Cubism
1942 - 1948
Source: 'Camouflage', 1942; an announcement for a teaching program [set up by Gorky and the director of the Grand Central School of Art, Edmund Greasen]

“Yes, Johannes Vermeer [Dutch 17th century master painter] paints in thin layers – there is no waste effort – and those small dots – no, they are not like Seurat's, though they contain all the light the pointillist may have wished for, concentrated, hovering before the object, but not obliterating it... Vermeer is not a sun painter, but rather a moon-painter – like Uccello – that's good, it is the pure, final stage of art, the moment when it becomes more real than reality.”

Arshile Gorky

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), pp. 357-58: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher]], 1947

“When I feel tired and discouraged and I lie down on the sofa, then I think of the simplest thing I can – a piece of string – and I go in it and paint it. That's the way to keep painting – to create something inside that makes you want to recreate it.”

Arshile Gorky

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

“It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint.”

Arshile Gorky

so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.
1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

“Subject.... no specific scene but many incidents.”

Arshile Gorky

The first word I spoke was Argula – it has no meaning. I was then five years old. Thus I called this painting 'Argula' as I was entering a new period closer to my instincts.
(Technique..:) Hundreds and hundreds of layers of paint to obtain the weight of reality – Art this period I measured by weight. [mid 1930's]
in his reply to Questionnaires of the MOMA museum, 1941
Gorky's quote refers on his multi-layered painting technique Gorky applied those days
1930 - 1941