US Postal Service to unveil a stamp featuring Arshile Gorky's "The Liver in a Cock's Comb"

PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky's 1944 painting "The Liver in a Cock's Comb," will be the first of a series of stamps being unveiled on March 11 by the US Postal Service honoring abstract expressionists.



With this stamp pane, the U.S. Postal Service honors the artistic innovations and achievements of 10 abstract expressionists, a group of artists who revolutionized art during the 1940s and 1950s and moved the U.S. to the forefront of the international art scene for the first time.



Other artists in the pane include Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, both collaborators of Gorky at the height of the abstract expressionist movement.



Abstract expressionism refers to a large body of work that comprised radically different styles, from still, luminescent fields of color to vigorous, almost violent, slashes of paint. In celebration of the abstract expressionist artists of the 20th century, art director Ethel Kessler and noted art historian Jonathan Fineberg (Gutgsell Professor of Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) selected ten paintings to feature on this colorful pane of self-adhesive stamps. Kessler used elements from Barnett Newman's Achilles (1952) to frame the stamps. The arrangement of the stamps suggests paintings hanging on a gallery wall. For design purposes the sizes of the stamps are not in relative proportion to the paintings.



A comprehensive exhibit of Gorky's work just completed in Philadelphia. The exhibit moves to the London Tate Modern Museum in February and will begin a run in June at Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles in June.



Arshile Gorky (born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan,  April 15, 1904? - July 21, 1948) was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. Gorky was born in the village of Khorgom, situated on the shores of Lake Van. It is not known exactly when he was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van.



Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in 1920. The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period. His The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a childhood photograph taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother.



In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early 1920s he was influenced by impressionism, although later in the decade he produced works that were more postimpressionist. During this time he was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cézanne. He also accepted a teaching position at the Grand Central School of Art.



Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver in the Cock's Comb". "The Betrothal II", and "One Year the Milkweed" immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many worldwide, including the Tate in London. In October 2009 the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major Arshile Gorky exhibition.