All language subtitles for [English] Arshile Gorky Beyond The Limit [DownSub.com]

‘The Limit’

by Arshile Gorky,

it’s an oil painting from 1947.

The painting came to us

for conservation work.

The edges were very fragile.

There was actually white tape

covering one and a half centimeter

of the actual painting,

which was applied by the framer in 1947.

The painting actually is paper

stuck down on a stretched canvas.

During the process

of undoing this tape,

we realized that actually

there was oil paint

coming straight

to the edge of the canvas.

Looking at the verso of ‘The Limit,’

we had little drops of

green color squeezed

through the canvas.

The oil color

came through the preparation

and through the canvas

from the recto.

And this could not have happened

through paper and preparation

and canvas.

So that’s why

seeing this early on,

we thought

maybe there’s a painting.

There was always a rumor,

maybe there is a painting underneath,

maybe it’s just a sketch,

maybe the color could just come

from the studio.

We didn’t know what was under ‘The Limit.’

There are so many things

to say about what

this investigation has revealed

about his creative process.

Because really so much of Gorky’s

work is enigmatic,

and he really didn’t speak about it

a lot during his lifetime, and so we’re kind of

putting the pieces together.

We definitely know that he came to his paintings

through a process

of drawing and experimenting

with graphite and ink and crayon on paper

as he worked through the composition

prior to transposing it into paint.

And this is something that he had been doing for

over a decade,

really steeped in what

we kind of consider to be

this 19th-century technique,

French 19th-century technique.

My darling Mougouch,

recently, I’ve been well

and I’ve been working

and my way of working is changing, and for this reason,

I always feel extremely anxious.

I want to attain works

which are more personal

and clean.

Gorky has been thrashing

over two particular canvases

and now having ravaged

and worn them down like an angry sea,

he has left them to go out

and draw, draw, draw.

He’s sitting, perched on his

stool out on the side of the hill,

sitting for hours

without seeming to move.

Maro had just been born and,

how was I going to deal with our

I mean, how

is I going to live in that flat

in that studio in New York?

So I suggested to my mother,

who had just bought a farmhouse in Virginia.

And so I said,

‘Well, of course,

we could come down and help you,

Gorky can dig in the garden

and I can cook.’

And so on.

And so that was struck

as a very good bargain.

We’d go in the spring

and we could watch the fall turn

because we went back the next

summer and the next summer.

We have a photo of Gorky in Crooked Run Farm

he’s sitting on a chair on a hill

in the middle of the landscape,

and it’s like he has

some type of piece

of cardboard on his lap

and on top of that is an

18 by 24 inch

piece of paper on which he’s drawing,

and that’s the size of most of the works on paper

from that summer.

Sometimes smaller as well.

He fell in love with the grasses

and the cows and the trees

and the weeds,

especially as the weeds change.

I mean, he couldn’t

get over the beauty of the milkweed.

What was so exciting about

it was that

he didn’t know what he was doing himself

and he’d come back and he’d say,

‘Can you see this?’

‘Well I’m looking at it,’ I’d say,

‘It’s wonderful,

it’s extraordinary.’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it,

if you don’t recognize anything?’

I said, ‘No, I don’t, I can recognize shapes,

but I don’t know what they refer to.’

You can see how nature was alive to him,

I mean, he was he really didn’t

see what I saw at all.

He saw things in it

and he looked

at the spaces between things

as much as he looked at the object itself.

Like things that he

might have seen in his dreams or

imagination, I don’t know,

or was a mixture of his early memories

and his new perceptions.

There are instances

from 1943 in which,

you know, he is transposing

the squared drawings into paint.

They have these wonderful

washes of color.

In general, it seems like he had finally

kind of unlocked the code

as to how he wanted to transpose them into paint.

And then around 1945,

he changes the way

in which he

works those compositions

into paintings

and you almost get what we

refer to as tinted drawings.

The paintings themselves

have a lot of bare canvas,

and he’s using a liner brush,

and he’s really making these

thin lines on a pre-primed

blank canvas.

Darling, Jeanne, anything that follows is

an understatement.

On Wednesday,

January 16th, Gorky’s

studio in the country

burned to the ground.

Everything was lost.

Gorky smelled some smoke,

but he was working with great passion

and thought it was his cigarette.

He was just happily working away

in the smoke.

Then he walked down and passed

by our friend, Jeanne

and she said, ‘Gorky,

what are you doing with all that water?’

Well he said, ‘I’m putting out the fire,’

that’s the first thing,

he walked by her

three or four times

without saying,

‘call the fire engines,’ or something.

Well, then came the operation, bang,

like that on top of it.

It was a terrible operation

for a colostomy,

that’s what it’s called.

So it’s like devastating

two months physically

and artistically.

And so that summer in 1946,

he’s actually not able to paint.

We thought that this summer we’d

have a house in Connecticut,

but that damn fire

destroyed everything.

Right now, I have to paint a lot

and you know that after

I went to hospital for a long time,

I wasn’t able to work.

Ultimately, he was really able to rebound from the fire.

Rejuvenate from that destruction and make out of it

really fabulous works.

I thought he would be absolutely broken.

Not at all.

He felt it didn’t matter,

it was all inside him

and it would all come out again.

Mougouch and his two kids

went to Maine for the summer.

They were visiting their aunt,

and so at that point, Gorky

was there alone, back into his studio

in New York, and he’s working ferociously.

You just have a sense of fury of activity.

He has this hoard of drawings

that are just fabulous from the earlier summer,

you know, dozens of Agony drawings,

dozens of Betrothal

15 Virginia Summers.

And we know he produced

just a number of paintings during that summer.

And that’s, you know, the point

in which he writes to Mougouch and he says,

‘I want to make a painting every day.’

I left at the end of May

and I was there until September.

So he was happy

in his own studio.

There was no nonsense

about being out of New York.

I had left him all the postcards

so that he could just

sign his name,

saying he was alright,

and he didn’t have to do anything

but post it.

June 1947,

the fatigue of my journey is over now.

Here I am, working day and night,

but my heart is there with you,

my sweet, my lovely Mougouch.

I love you, my sweet dear.

I’m so blessed in having your love

and blessed by the day

when the great sun guided me to you.

July 16th, 1947

The days have been terribly

hot, today particularly.

Mougouch, I’ve been painting every day

and now want to paint a picture every day.

Late summer 1947

Mougouch, my only love.

I’ve been working all day

and cleaning the house by night.

Yes, working

and dreaming for you to come home,

my dear.

I’m feeling

well and looking after myself.

Almost every morning,

I am up at six o’clock

and take a bath and walk in the park for an hour,

and I’m back to the house

at seven and work hard until seven

in the evening and at night,

I draw or look at the art books and dream about you.

August 8th, 1947

My darling love.

I’ve been working very well

and making very many paintings.

I wish you could see them.

Julien sold the painting, tentatively

deducted a commission of 20%,

as he writes,

Do you think that is all right?

And even if I succeed in selling a painting,

then I can’t paint another because the materials

are so expensive.

Gorky was low on material

at the end of 1947,

beginning of 1948.

He writes to his dealer, Julien Levy,

and negotiates a raise

on the basis

that he needs materials.

So we know ‘The Limit’ was painted

that summer in 1947.

It’s one of the rare works that was exhibited

during Gorky’s lifetime

at the Julien Levy Gallery.

It was not unusual for Gorky to

stretch a new canvas

over a finished painting.

I mean, stretchers are expensive,

all the artist materials are very expensive.

So, artists just want to continue their work.

They don’t want to go to the shop

and buy new.

They just want to get on.

The whole painting on ‘The Limit,’

it’s one go.

He painted very quickly.

All the different layers of black line,

color patches.

This was done maybe during one day.

The paper,

which is nearly sanded surface,

the way he was painting

with his brushes,

it’s this fluent way

like you do a pastel.

The condition of the surface,

the oil paint is excellent.

After having detached

the brown tape along the edge

of the stretcher of ‘The Limit,’

very quickly, we realized that the oil paint

underneath ‘The Limit’,

was going straight

to the edge of the canvas, and

the major surface of the paper

would certainly not adhere

to the oil paint.

And luckily,

we were right.

‘Virginia Summer’

was in excellent condition.

It was bright color,

and it was a great privilege

for us to be number two and three

seeing this painting

for the first time.

Both works are related

to a number of drawings

that the artist had created

the previous summer in Virginia,

at Crooked Run Farm.

For ‘The Limit,’

there is a preparatory drawing

and two paintings,

but there have been a group

of about 15 drawings

that have been referred

to as ‘Virginia Summer’

for a number of decades,

yet there was no associated painting.

And so I think that that was the great aha moment

when we unveiled

‘The Limit’ was that,

immediately we looked at and thought,

Oh my God, this is ‘Virginia Summer.’

We were able to identify

that through the composition,

the structure of the forms,

which was determined by the drawing.

With respect to ‘The Limit’,

being able to view the verso

of that work on paper

is just tremendously educational.

Olivier was able

to recognize indentations on the verso,

suggesting that the work

had originally began

as a drawing,

most likely with graphite.

To our great surprise,

by looking to the back of ‘The Limit,’

we realize

there was a preparatory drawing

which he squared

like the Renaissance painter are doing.

During the whole conservation campaign,

we thought that having discovered

the drawing embossed line

on the verso, we thought, well,

he drew his drawing

on the paper,

and then he puts on several

preparation grounds,

a gray, a green,

and he would not see

his drawing anymore.

But having a close look

to the painted surface,

he made a finished ground

where he put

white paint with brush,

wiped it off with a textile

or with the hand or whatever.

And actually,

in the embossed line

from the drawing,

you do have an accumulation

of white paint.

And this gave Gorky

an indication

where the drawing

and the elements were placed.

Drawing is really Gorky’s

strong suit in terms of developing compositions.

I was not surprised

that we found

a painting under ‘The Limit,’

but I was surprised

to find the painting

that we found.

The caliber of that work

we found underneath, its relationship

to his other works,

that was a surprise, definitely.