Painted circa 1928-29, Still Life represents an ambitious leap forward in Arshile Gorky’s artistic development. This work celebrates abundance in all forms, via its impactful large scale, Gorky’s generous and expressive application of paint, and the bounty of cascading fruit central to the composition. Fleeing the Armenian genocide, Gorky emigrated to the United States in 1920, the year following his mother’s death from starvation. By 1924, he settled in New York, where he enrolled and soon became an instructor at the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art. When Still Life was painted circa 1928-29, Gorky had established a rigorous practice of self-education via museum and gallery visits, and art publications, through which he encountered developments advanced by the European avant-garde, including Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. Still Life was painted at an extraordinarily pivotal moment in Gorky’s career, just before he forged friendships with several other leading American artists such as Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning through his participation in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. “…Yet the silent consequences of Stuart Davis move us to the cool and intellectual world where all human emotions are disciplined upon regular proportions,” Gorky wrote in 1931. “This man, this American, this pioneer, this modest painter…who renders—clear, more definite, more and more decided—new forms and new objects.” [1] Gorky’s legacy on subsequent generations of artists is profound; he later become an important Surrealist painter and one of the first Abstract Expressionists.

[1] Arshile Gorky, “Stuart Davis,” Creative Art, vol. 9. September 1931, pp. 213-217.