Arshile Gorky & Isamu Noguchi: A Lecture by Amy Lyford

On the occasion of ‘Arshile Gorky. Horizon West’ on view at our West Hollywood gallery, please join us on Saturday 18 April at 2 pm for a screening and lecture on the longstanding friendship between Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi with art historian, author and professor at Occidental College, Amy Lyford.
This lecture and screening will examine the intertwined artistic histories of Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi during the early to mid‑1940s. The program will trace their longstanding friendship, from their drive together to California to their shared creative community in San Francisco, and will highlight their connection with artist Jeanne Reynal, whose support helped Gorky secure an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). During this same period, Noguchi also presented work in San Francisco, exhibiting there in 1942. Drawing on archival materials, the lecture will illuminate the relationships, influences, and overlapping exhibitions that shaped both artists’ practices during this pivotal moment.
The exhibition ‘Arshile Gorky. Horizon West’ presents a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before and after his transcontinental trip in 1941 from New York NY to California CA, tracing the evolution of his incomparable approach to the genre. The exhibition features never-before-exhibited works alongside paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show in 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), offering visitors a rare opportunity to examine the expansion of Gorky’s abstract landscapes in response to his first-hand experience of America’s terrain.
Event Program:
2 pm:
Screening of ‘Horizon West’ directed by Cosima Spender (run time is 23 minutes)
2.25 pm:
Lecture on Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi by Amy Lyford
The program is free to attend, however, reservations are recommended.
About Amy Lyford
Amy Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles where she teaches modern and contemporary US and European art history. Her book Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor and National Identity (Univ of California Press, 2013) won the 2015 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles C Eldridge Prize.

Image: Arshile Gorky, December 1935, Giving a lecture at the Guild Art Gallery, New York, during his exhibition of drawings © 2026 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Arshile Gorky Foundation; Isamu Noguchi with Metamorphosis (1946) and The Queen (1931), c. 1940s. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 03776. Photographer unknown. © 2026 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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