zhang daqian (chang dai-chien) / brown landscape

Unquestionably one of the most important Chinese painters of the Twentieth Century, Chang Daichien has been compared to Picasso in many exhibition essays and catalogs. That analogy is often accompanied by evidence of their ‘summit’ in 1956 at Picasso’s Mediterranean villa, La California, but is meant to more generally suggest the breadth of the artist’s fame, unparalleled productivity and stylistic variety, and charismatic personality.1 Unique in the mastery of historical styles dating back to the 9th Century, reintroduction of brilliant color with painterly modeling, and grand synthesis of these traditions with aspects of Euro-American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Chang Dai-chien is a singular giant of Chinese painting.
Yet even though the artist lived half of his career in the West and a decade in California, his work remains virtually unknown in the American artworld except in the Chinese American community and among scholars. This obscurity is especially surprising in light of the high visibility afforded Asian American artists including Isamu Noguchi, Chang Dai-chien’s contemporary (1904-1988), and contemporary artist Hung Liu. Because ink painting is segregated academically and rarely presented in American museums, there is a widespread lack of familiarity about its traditions, aesthetics and practitioners. Perhaps as few non-Chinese can read inscriptions, rapid or casual appreciation is limited for many. James Cahill has written that Chinese paintings can appear “small and flat and hard to penetrate” to Westerners, in contrast with the seeming “forcefulness and immediacy” of European paintings; conversely, Cahill adds that Chinese painting experts sometimes complain about European painting lacking variety in brushwork.2 Chang Dai-chien felt quite differently, protesting “some people complain that Chinese landscapes are plain while the trees are flat. But this is absolutely false.3 Even though his work is resolutely rooted in Chinese painting traditions, Chang Dai-chien felt “there is no rigid line of demarcation between Chinese painting and Western painting,” except perhaps “in the media and materials of the painter” and “in regional divergence in custom. [Read more...]

A vivid biomorphic style and uniquely tragic personal history define Arshile Gorky as a major figure in twentieth-century modernism. While often classified as late Surrealism or as a precursor of Abstract Expressionism, his emotionally charged abstract style holds a distinct place among the explorations of the avant-garde.

Born in Armenia, Gorky emigrated to the United States as teenager in 1920. He and his family left their native land under duress after the genocide and massive displacement of Armenians during the World War I. Gorky’s mother starved to death as a result of their forced march—later, her memory inspired a series of family portraits. Although the upheaval of his early life profoundly shaped his art, Gorky took pains to obscure his Armenian heritage. Born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, the artist abandoned his given name for a more Russian-sounding pseudonym after coming to the United States. To perpetuate the deception, he even claimed to be a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky. As a young man, Gorky studied at the New School of Design in Boston and, later, the Grand Central School of Art in New York, where he taught from 1925 to 1931.

In the 1920s and 1930s Gorky embarked on a self-directed effort to retrace the artistic revolutions of Cézanne and Picasso. He had relatively little interest in Analytic Cubism, but was particularly interested in Picasso’s flat, richly painted, and deeply colored Synthetic Cubist paintings of the 1920s. Gorky’s acquaintance with Synthetic Cubist work–specifically that by Picasso–came primarily through his familiarity with paintings in museums and in publications such as Cahiers d’Art, a leading periodical that featured reproductions of works by both Braque and Picasso.

During his first decade in the United States, Gorky befriended Stuart Davis and John Graham, two artists who were also pursuing Cubist motifs. Gorky, Graham, and Davis came to be known as the “three musketeers.” Graham became a particularly important influence on Gorky in the 1930s, providing Gorky with stylistic and intellectual material that would complement Gorky’s understanding of Cubism. Gorky also developed a close relationship with Willem de Kooning soon after the Dutch-born artist arrived in the United States in 1926, and he helped introduce him other artists working in New York.

In the mid to late 1930s, Gorky moved away from Cubism and toward the looser, more emotional style he would explore for the rest of his career. The Garden in Sochi series, created from 1936 to 1942, marked an important new direction for him, both artistically and personally. The series was inspired by the Gorky family’s garden in Khorkom, the Armenian village where Gorky was born and spent his early childhood. Biomorphic shapes reflect the strong influence of Joan Miró on the artist during this period. The colorful shapes scattered across the solid-colored ground are generally understood to contain symbolic references to Gorky’s life. These forms are rendered so abstract, however, that explicit narrative readings of these works are impossible.

Just as he reached artistic maturity in the mid-1940s, Gorky was beset by series of tragedies: a studio fire that resulted in the loss of much of his work, a diagnosis of throat cancer, a car crash, and the breakup of his second marriage. He committed suicide in 1948, still relatively unknown outside art world circles. By 1951, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted “Arshile Gorky: Memorial Exhibition,” Gorky’s stature as an important modernist painter was secure.

References
Herrera, Hayden. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003).

Rand, Harry. Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

© Copyright 2007 Hollis Taggart Galleries

Stuart Davis (American, 1894–1964) / The Mellow Pad / 1945–51 / Oil on canvas / 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.6 / www.brooklynmuseum.org

This morning I was reading Hans Hofmann’s essay, ”The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin,” which I can read over and over and get something new every time I read it. But, today it got me to thinking about Stuart Davis, a pioneer of American Modernism and abstract painting, who wrote extensively about abstraction, but whose writings are not easy to come by. Davis identified what termed the “color-space” problem. While I’ve been unable to study his writings, metmuseum.org writes the following:

Davis postulated that color could be used to indicate spatial relationships through its positioning next to other colors. Some colors advance, while others recede, which suggests the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. [Read more...]

Now this theory sounds a lot like what Hofmann discusses, and while it is not important who was first, it is helpful to see that two important 20th abstract painters were thinking deeply about color and we know their ideas have had a significant impact on contemporary painters over the last 50 years. In fact, it was Stuart Davis’ paintings, more so than Picasso or Matisse, that first got me excited about the possibilities of abstraction. While I was in art school studying illustration, heavily involved in anatomy and figure drawing, I went to the Brooklyn Museum and was completely transfixed by Davis’ The Mellow Pad. I stood in front staring at the piece for about 20 or 30 min and it was all I could think about for days – the movement, the colors, the energy, the shapes and forms dancing and swinging across the surface were a revelation to me at the time.

In terms of abstract paintings that are built on flat shapes/planes of color, Davis’ work offers and interesting contrast with the work of Stanley Whitney’s or Hans Hofmann’s. While all three artists use flat planes of color to create spacial tensions and rhythmatic movements across the surface, in the examples of both Hofmann and Whitney we see color formed into geometrical shapes and planes, while Davis’ shapes are more organic (not biomorphic like Miro). The expression in each is totally different and unique.