Douglas Gorsline

Douglas W. Gorsline (1913–1985) was an American painter and writer who was born in Rochester, New York. He attended Yale School of Art and the Art Students League of New York.

He taught at the National Academy of Design in New York City before moving to France in 1964. He was the first American artist invited to China (1973). His work was exhibited regularly in the United States and in France, Belgium and Germany. He received a great many awards and his works are in several museum, institutional and private collections.

The Gorsline Museum was inaugurated in 1994 at Bussy-le-Grand, in Côte-d'Or, France.

Style

Gorsline’s technique and sources derive from certain elements of cubism and realism. He often uses cubist composition as a means of approaching the real. Marcel Duchamp had a strong effect on him because he joined the idea of movement to the concepts of cubism — as in the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. It is of note that both Gorsline and Duchamp were inspired by the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey who in order to fulfill his scientific pursuits invented cameras and methods to decompose movement.

While other schools of art seemed to concentrate on playing with reality in displaced or symbolic ways, Gorsline sought a solution that allowed his subjects their true actuality, their true features — all the more true in that they are seen in a state of movement. Technical and emotional values are joined in each canvas. Meanwhile one can see the expression of a sequential simultaneity, a succession of realities, which coexist, in our lives and in the world in which we live.

Books

• What People Wore: 1,800 Illustrations from Ancient Times to the Early Twentieth Century, ISBN 0-486-28162-0
• The Night Before Christmas, Clement Clarke Moore, ISBN 0-394-83019-9
• The Pioneers, Marie Gorsline, ISBN 0-394-83904-8
• Haunted Bookshop avec Christopher Morley, ISBN 0-7858-1825-1
• Cowboys avec Marie Gorsline, ISBN 0-394-83935-8
• Mr. Lincoln's Whiskers avec Burke Davis, ISBN 0-698-20455-7
• North American Indians, ISBN 0-8085-5150-7
• The Vicksburg Veteran avec F. N. Monjo, ISBN 0-671-65156-0

External links

• Gorsline Museum
• University of California at Santa Barbara

Persondata
Name	Gorsline, Douglas
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1913
Place of birth
Date of death	1985
Place of death