3/22: Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb

 

                Teaching one’s self the principles of art is no mean feat, but artist Arshile Gorky seemed to have a lot to say as well as being determined to express it.  Born in Armenia in 1905, he immigrated to America in 1920 to escape the Turkish genocide of Armenians.  Most of his works express his experiences and feelings on the matter, as well as contain both outright and implied sexual images. His style is characterized by both figuration and abstraction seemingly melded into one another, much in the styles of Cezanne and Picasso.  This work captures that nature perfectly by creating a wild landscape and a perfectly ordered interpretation of a human internal anatomy simultaneously.  The work itself, if taken from a symbolic statement of the artist, seems to speak of the perfectly ordered world in which Gorsky lived before the wild and savage world around him came and destroyed it.  The title as well as the work itself suggest many double meanings, such as the “cock’s comb”, which is both a headdress, and a feathered phallic symbol that seem to link both mind and body.  The liver was often  thought of in past as a the source of passion and love rather than the heart, so the title itself could be suggesting that it is connected the both the mind and body, as well as being represented on the canvas.

Analysis of the symbols in the work:

http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_wok.cgi?p_id=82&w_id=223

Foundation formed in his honor:

http://arshilegorkyfoundation.org/foundation-information

More on the artist’s life:

http://arshilegorky.com/bio.shtml