Agony and ecstasy of the inner life
By Jackie Wullschlager

FT
May 12 2007 03:00

The Armenian painter Vosdanig Adoian never set foot in Paris but when
he burst on to New York’s art scene in the 1930s, equipped with the
Russian pseudonym Arshile Gorky and a set of tall tales about his life,
what mattered was that he said he had studied there.

In fact, his understanding of the European canon, then unrivalled in
America, was built up by years of lonely, painstaking imitation after
he emigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1920. "First I was
with Cézanne, then, naturally, I was with Picasso," he explained. A
dealer promised the half-starving artist an exhibition when he would
eventually be "with Gorky" but, almost as soon as he defined his own
style, Gorky committed suicide, hanging himself in his Connecticut barn
in 1948.

He left a stash of incandescent, fiery, half-surreal, half-abstract
paintings that were a vital bridge between European modernism and
American abstract expressionism. They remain underrated and
under-explored. It is a masterstroke of the Pompidou to take these
1940s works as the subject of the first special exhibition in its newly
hung galleries, which tell the story of 20th- century art with a French
emphasis. Brilliantly, the show co-opts Gorky as the hinge: the fake
but key passenger on art’s wartime journey from Paris to New York,
grounding American postwar triumph in European prewar foundations.

Two big rooms devoted to Gorky’s large-scale, high-key colourist
paintings open out on to the Pompidou’s permanent collection to face
the abstract swirls and torrents of Kandinsky, whom Gorky pretended had
been his teacher in Paris. Round the corner are the bright arabesques
that remind us that Gorky’s lengthy period "with Miró" was most
decisive of all. To confront memories of trauma during the Armenian
genocide of 1915 and the subsequent famine, which killed his mother,
Gorky drew both on the spiritual intensity of the Russian painter and
on the Spaniard’s impulsive love of sun-drenched nature. Both Gorky and
Miró, born within a year of each other, grew up on farms. Both their
oeuvres are suffused with pre-industrial, rural rhythms.

Among works from the early 1940s, "Waterfall", one of the first
canvases painted in response to the American landscape and its
exhilarating sense of space, echoes Kandinsky’s cascades of thick,
dripping colour and nervy, improvised compositions. Set against it is
the warm yellow "Garden in Sochi", whose Miró-like biomorphic forms
recall the garden of Gorky’s childhood home on Lake Van. "I like the
heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song," Gorky wrote
of this painting. "The wheatfields, the plough, the apricots, the shape
of apricots those flirts of the sun."

A few years later, in "Cornfield of Health", the same yellow-red earthy
tonality, the same radiant memory of a destroyed paradise recurs but no
longer looks back to Miró. Instead, sensuous patches of colour and
giant, fluid doodles anticipate the energetic gestural quality of de
Kooning and even Pollock. When critics suggested influence had gone the
other way, de Kooning was furious. "When, about 15 years ago, I walked
into Arshile’s studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so
beautiful that I got a little dizzy and, when I came to, I was bright
enough to take the hint," he wrote in 1948. For a while the two shared
a studio. Both continued to explore man’s relationship with nature even
in their most abstracted works.

The doodles and curving blobs in "Cornfield of Health" suggest swelling
breasts, gaping mouths. Gorky, like de Kooning in his toothy "Women"
series, was mother-fixated. But where de Kooning is raucously sexual,
even comic, a vein of tragedy courses through the thin black lines with
which Gorky traces hidden landscapes and figures through transparent,
flat washes of colour. His famous, early painting of himself and his
mother, monumental, icon-like, white as a ghost, fading away from
starvation, is unfortunately not here. But her nurturing presence
haunts the lush images of growth, abundance, fruition in "Child’s
Companions" and "Act of Creation". Equally, the shock of losing her
resonates through heavy grey and white paintings and pastels such as
"Vale of the Armenians" and "The Diary of a Seducer".

Between 1946 and 1948, Gorky’s fragile sense of self was undermined by
cancer, a colostomy, a car crash that broke his neck, a fire that
destroyed his studio and paintings – he rushed in to save a single
photograph of his mother – and his wife’s infidelity with the painter
Matta. Wrenching memories of childhood loss resurfaced, unspoken – so
skilfully had Gorky reinvented himself in America that his wife did not
discover he was Armenian until after his death. But as a painter of the
agony and ecstasy of the inner life, he now took off from surrealism to
forge his own language.

"Agony" (1947), borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is
a tense, claustrophobic canvas of sexual misery in the colours of fire
– hot reds, reddish browns, shards of yellow and white.

In the tragic "Days etc", the faint image of a reclining nude almost
dissolves behind transparent veils of turpentine-thinned, grey-green,
blurry pigment. "Painfully I at last conclude that this life means
nothing and is only a painful withdrawal," Gorky wrote. See such works
at MoMA alongside Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko, and the free-wheeling
marks and all-over compositions look quintessentially mid-century
American. At the Pompidou, they look more European. "With this sensuous
richness, which is a refined product of assimilated French tradition,
and his own personality as an artist, Gorky at last arrives at
himself," Clement Greenberg wrote in 1948. For the man, it was too
late, but the art looks ever stronger.

‘Arshile Gorky: Hommage’ to June 4 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress