"In short it is my concern to emphasize that Gorky is, of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sit down to paint before her. Furthermore, it is out of the question that he would take the expression of this nature as an end in itself – rightly he demands of her that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind.. .Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life, in the discovery of the very rhythm of life."
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Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky (15 April 1904 – 21 July 1948), born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan, was an American abstract expressionist painter of Armenian descent, living and working in New York, where he got later strongly involved with American Surrealism. He was a very close friend of Willem de Kooning who respected him as a teacher in painting.
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