Arshile Gorky - Modern Quotes

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An epidemic of destruction sweeps the world today. The mind of civilized man is set to stop it. What the enemy would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze this vision is the role of camouflage. Here the artist and more particularly the modern artist can fulfill a vital function for opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation. Historically, it has been the artist's role to make manifest the beautiful inherent in all the objects of nature and man. In the study of the object, as a thing seen, he has acquired a profound understanding and sensibility concerning its visual aspects..

Arshile Gorky
They [the critics] forget that while the artist never works outside his time yet his art will go on to be merged gradually into the new art of a new age. There will be no short stop. We shall not, contrary to the expectation of these people, hear of the sudden death of Cubism, abstraction, so-called modern art.... if they could but realize that energy is a spiritual movement and that they must conceive of working under a law of universal aesthetic progress, as we do in science, in mathematics, in physics.

Arshile Gorky
[speaking about a Persian rug...] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.

Arshile Gorky
.. it was the Cubist painters who created the new magic of space and color that everywhere today confronts our eyes in new architecture and design. Since then the various branches of modern art through exhaustive experiment and research have created a vast laboratory whose discoveries unveiled for all the secrets of form, line and color..

Arshile Gorky