Portrait of Akabi 1936

Arshile Gorky painted this portrait of Akabi in 1926. You can see how Gorky has built up the face using simple strokes of oil paint, applied with an almost dry brush. The texture is quite rough, the weave of the canvas shows through the paint, and the artist has let the colors pool and bleed into each other. This almost crude technique has a long history, you could see it as connecting to traditions of craft and folk art. But it could also be associated with more 'high art' precedents, like Cezanne. Gorky may have been deliberately contrasting this primitivist technique, with the modern subject of this painting. The work is a reminder that even the most modern and avant-garde artwork is always created through a material process, and emerges from a long tradition of making. It also tells us that artists do not live outside the bounds of social class and labor practices.