RIP Dore Ashton, an Art Historian who embraced Modernism dies at 88.
Dore Ashton 
NYtimes Dore Ashton who embraced and inhabited moernism dies at 88.
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Portrait of Dore Ashton by Alice Neel
Ashton took her notes from Franz Kafka who believed that an “artist was a man of many lives, many potential personalities, and many different relationships.” This outlook on artists is a uniquely modern one. Many artists in the Pre-modern era fit this description, but it was of very little consequence, before the Impressionists, how artists adjusted themselves to fit into society. According to Ashton, it was Arshile Gorky who, upon landing in New York in 1925, made it not only fashionable but acceptable for other New York artists to feel a real sense of liberty and experimentation, to wear different masks when it suited them.
“He was,” wrote Ashton, “at once, a painter who refused to put a face on his forms and a painter who, at times – moved by sentimental memories – assigned associations to certain paintings.” These meandering tendencies were not those of an artist without direction or focus, but of a man who fully recognized the wealth of form available to the imaginative eye. Ashton believes that Gorky set the bar for those younger New York artists who during the pre-WWII years did lack direction and focus.