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Home>Exhibitions>Past>2019>American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner

# American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner

July 31, 2019 – February 19, 2020East Building, Ground Level - Gallery 106A

Nathan L**erner,*******Eye and Barbed Wire*, 1939, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.74

**This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.**

 The painter Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) and the photographer Nathan Lerner (1913–1997) worked in different cities and probably never met. Yet they were united by the influence of surrealism, an artistic movement that started in France in the 1920s and sought to channel the powers of the unconscious mind into art.

Many American artists embraced surrealism in the late 1930s and 1940s, particularly after the 1936–1937 exhibition *Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism* at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the arrival in the United States of European surrealists fleeing war and fascism. As the works in this room show, Gorky, a pioneer of abstract expressionism or the so-called New York School, and Lerner, who studied and taught photography at Chicago’s New Bauhaus, found diverse ways to engage with the movement’s ideas.

Surrealism’s influence is evident in Gorky’s and Lerner’s strange, sometimes violent imagery. Lerner often distorted the human figure, isolating body parts such as the eyeball and twisting forms into wiry visions. Many of Gorky’s works evoke reclining nudes that have been turned inside out, or organ-like shapes that have been liberated from bodies. In pursuit of these unnerving images, both Gorky and Lerner pushed the boundaries of their chosen media. In his drawings, Gorky deliberately smudged pencil marks and aggressively scratched into the paper with his pen. Lerner made his photographs into hallucinatory images by shooting through screens like textured glass and experimenting with light in novel ways.

Taken together, their restless explorations suggest the far reaches of the human imagination, increasingly untethered from the constraints of naturalism.

**About this Series**American Art, 1900–1950: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs**

During a period fueled by enormous urban growth and technological changes, riven by world wars, and rocked by new modes of thought, American artists explored many diverse means to express their changing experience and environment. Prints, drawings, and photographs were vital media through which artists pursued radical experiments in form, figuration, and abstraction. Reevaluating European traditions, they developed new ways of seeing the modern world around them. Complementing the American modernist paintings and sculptures in the adjacent galleries, these rotating installations feature prints, drawings, and photographs by American artists working in the first half of the 20th century. By looking at pairs or groups of artists, or at broader themes such as abstract portraiture or the Machine Age, the installations spark conversations between established and lesser-known figures in American modernism and highlight the era’s full range and complexity.

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Composition*, c. 1931, pen and black ink on wove paper, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen, 2007.141.19

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Portrait of the Artist's Mother*, c. 1926-1938, graphite on coquille board, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1981.100.1

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia*, 1932, pen and brush and black ink over graphite, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert A. Goldstone, 1992.110.1

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia*, c. 1932/1934, pen and black and brown ink over graphite with scraping on wove paper, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund and Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1979.21.1

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Seated Figure*, 1934, graphite on wove paper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Olga Hirshhorn), 2015.19.3374

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Virginia Landscape*, 1944, graphite and crayon on wove paper, Gift of Mrs. Walter Salant, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary ofthe National Gallery of Art, 1991.43.1

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Arshile Gorky, *Untitled (Study for "The Plow and the Song")*, c. 1944, graphite and crayon on wove paper, squared for transfer, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1979.13.5

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Untitled (Light Box Study with Wires, Screen and String)*, 1930s, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds from the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.5094

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Untitled, Light Drawing*, n.d., gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.44

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *The Swimmer*, 1935, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.22

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Car Light Study #3*, 1937, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.65

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Night Branches*, 1938, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.24

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Eye and Strings*, 1939, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.63

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Eye and Barbed Wire*, 1939, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.74

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Charley's Eye*, 1940, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.52

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan Lerner
Nathan Lerner, *Shadow*, 1943, gelatin silver print, Gift of Kiyoko Lerner, 2012.115.26

**Organization:** Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

**Passes:** Admission is always free and passes are not required

Alfred Stieglitz and His CircleSeptember 30, 2016–April 11, 2017

Made in America: Radical FiguresApril 12–November 15, 2017

Machine Age ModernismNovember 17, 2017–May 29, 2018

Alfred Stieglitz and John MarinJune 1–December 10, 2018

Diverse Modernisms, 1935-1955December 13, 2018–July 30, 2019

American Surreal: Arshile Gorky and Nathan LernerOngoing from July 31, 2019

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American Prints

American Drawings

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