Self-Portrait 1937

Arshile Gorky’s Self-Portrait is an intimate look at the artist, rendered in muted greens, pinks, and blues with an underlying grid structure. I can only imagine Gorky approaching the canvas, the dance between intention and accident, adding and subtracting, until the image emerges. There’s a push-and-pull. Do you think he started with the face? The background? I'm curious. It’s not hyperreal, this guy, but there's a raw honesty to the gesture, capturing something essential about his inner state at that time. He’s caught mid-thought. I wonder how he felt about his contemporary painters? Did he have a rival? Who was he trying to impress? Looking at this work, I feel like painters today are in direct conversation with Gorky. We’re all just riffing off each other, across time. It’s a process of call and response, where fixed ideas get turned into questions, and we are free to embrace a multitude of possibilities.