At 70, R.C. Gorman loves to reminisce. Hearty chuckles pepper stories cooked up from a lifetime of making art and friends — friends like Andy Warhol, with whom he has traded art and had dinner many times.
"He was a nice guy," Gorman says about Warhol. "He was sort of strange. He would invite you to dinner and wouldn't eat anything himself, but he picked up the tab.
Gorman was in town recently to see "Possession Obsession," the exhibition of more than 300 objects from Warhol's personal collection currently on display at The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side of Pittsburgh. "I'm paying my respects for having taken me to dinner several times," he says.
He was also here for the opening of the current exhibition of his work at Four Winds Gallery in Shadyside.
Gorman is the most renowned living Native American Indian painter, once described by The New York Times as "the Picasso of Native American art."
One of the featured works in his Four Winds Gallery show is "Lady Taking a Nap" a pastel drawing from 1979 once owned by Warhol. It was one of a few drawings that Gorman had traded for four portraits of himself that Warhol had made. Having been sold in Sotheby's 1988 auction of all of Warhol's possessions, the piece still has the original lot sticker, #995, on the lower left of the frame.
"I really went after that one," says John Krena, owner of Four Winds Gallery, about the drawing. "I bought that from a collector in Albuquerque who is a friend of mine. I knew he had it. I said I am doing this show. He had no interest in selling it. I just kind of pestered him and bothered him and talked him into it."
In addition to the drawing, Krena has gathered over 45 works for this show including the very first print he purchased from Gorman's Navajo Gallery in 1975, a year after Krena opened Four Winds Gallery, titled "Night," which features two robed Indian women shrouded in darkness.
"That was the very first piece I ever purchased from him," Krena says. "From that point on I began carrying his work."
Krena thinks of this show as a retrospective, and in many ways it is with works spanning the last 30 years, most of which are hand-pulled, original lithographs as well as a few paper casts and original drawings.
Gorman, a Navajo Indian, was born in 1931 on the Chinle Reservation in Arizona near the Canyon De Chelly. After a stint with Navy in the first half of the 1950s, he attended the Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz., where, in 1958, he was awarded the first scholarship ever given by the Navajo tribe for study outside the United States.
The scholarship allowed him to travel to Mexico City to attend the College of Mexico, where he created his first lithographs under the tutelage of master printer Jose Sanchez. It was lithography that was to put Gorman on the map — that and the opening of his Navajo Gallery in Taos, N.M., in 1968, after gaining prominence as a painter living and working in San Francisco for 10 years.
Though Gorman has gone through many phases with his work in numerous media, all of his pieces reflect the cultural traditions of his Navajo heritage. And even though he has created a multitude of Southwest landscapes and abstractions of native pottery, rug and mask designs, nothing has come to represent Gorman's oeuvre more than his images of Native American Indian women.
"I've experimented with so many things," Gorman says. "I've gone through so many phases and stages and I end up with these lovely women and I guess I will retire with them."
For most of his career he has been painting them — strong, stoic figures that seem to spring forth from the earth as if personifications of Mother Nature herself, enigmatic, beautiful and nurturing all at once.
Though women are a thematic constant, Gorman somehow has managed to derive infinite interpretations of them. Sometimes placing them with native pots, plants and tapestries, either alone or in groups.
Several works in this show are excellent examples of both his subjects and his process of lithography, which has become the most widely collected form of Gorman's art.
For example, in "Acomita" a woman sits next to a large pot; in "Mystique" a woman stands next to a native flower in a stark, yet colorful, Southwest landscape; and in two different versions of "The Gatherers" a group of Indian women pick through baskets of chili peppers.
All of Gorman's women are drawn from live models. "I have about four favorites," Gorman says. "I have seen them get pregnant, have children and they are getting old right along with me, but I will always be faithful to them."
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