ARSHILE GORKY

“I don’t like that word, “finish.” When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting—I just stop working on it for a while.” These are the worlds of Arshile Gorky, one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 20th century, and perhaps an explanation for why he worked on this painting for nearly twenty years. As a child, Gorky watched his mother die of starvation, ill in health after surviving a death march during the Ottoman Turk genocide of the Armenians. Years later, having left Armenia and changed his name, Gorky found a photograph of himself and his mother taken when he was only eight years old. He laboured that image into a painting, reworking and improving, leaving it for months at a time and then returning in moments of inspiration. In this way, the painting was never finished, and so his mother remained alive, and in a sort of daily dialogue with her son. The double portrait is one of the most revered and admired in modern art, the depths of its sadness only matched by the wealth of its beauty.

JOSEPH STELLA

With boundless creativity, and a seemingly endless will to experiment, Joseph Stella felt restrained by every country he inhabited. In his native Italy, he found the shadow of the Renaissance omnipresent, even in the fledgling futurist movement he could feel its presence and its constriction on his desire for the new. His first stint in America was challenging and unenjoyable, he found the land and climate unbearable and the nation not willing to accept the beauty of its modernity. Travels around Europe and time in Paris brought him into contact with increasingly more avant-garde movements, and he absorbed the principles of Cubism, Fauvism, and the now established Futurism. He took these movement with him and returned to America, finding the country more open to his restless mind, and accepting of the radical art he made. Stella is ultimately remembered for his cityscapes, his wild and energetic paintings of New York’s architecture, but this still life is notable for how elegantly it combines tradition, simplicity, with the sharp geometry and abstraction. It captures a man between worlds, who could absorb ideas from across time and place and create something uniquely his own.

STUART DAVIS

Stuart Davis was known for his hard edge, lively abstractions that married European abstraction with a distinctly American modernism, creating dynamic works that sung with the tempo of jazz and spoke to urban existence. His work was charged with advertising motifs, sharp corners and graphic displays of color that bring rigidity alive, so to see him so loose with his hand here is both unusual and revealing. Many later artists and critic position Davis as a proto-pop artist, predating the movement by nearly four decades, and despite the simplicity of his drawing here, that remains evident. In so few lines he renders a martini and a plant and imbues them with a sense of style, of American cool. It is hard to look at this work and not see its influence of Warhol’s drawings of the 1950s and 60s, capturing a mood and a time with vivid feeling and minimal detail.