Boston Globe

Whistler takes a boarder
Gorky collection finds unusual home in Lowell artist’s museum

Two untitled works by Arshile Gorky show the artist was experimenting
with the various styles and idioms of his modernist predecessors. Two
untitled works by Arshile Gorky show the artist was experimenting with
the various styles and idioms of his modernist predecessors.
By Sebastian Smee

Globe Staff / September 26, 2009

LOWELL – It’s all a bit bemusing, and not the easiest to explain. But
through one historical quirk and another, a small museum in Lowell
that commemorates the birthplace of James McNeill Whistler is now in
the possession of almost 30 early paintings, drawings, and prints by
Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-born progenitor of American Abstract
Expressionism.

What does Gorky have to do with Whistler? And is it not a bit strange
for a museum dedicated to the memory of Whistler to become a better
place to look at works by Gorky than works by Whistler (which are thin
on the ground, to put it generously, at the Whistler House Museum of
Art)?

These are questions to which I have no particularly illuminating
answer. But you can ponder them to your heart’s content as you take in
`Drawings & Paintings by Arshile Gorky: Mina Boehm Metzger
Collection,” a small but fascinating show celebrating a substantial
new addition to the Whistler House Museum of Art. (The museum
describes it as a `permanent loan.”)

The works are all from the collection of Mina Boehm Metzger, who
studied art under Gorky at the Grand Central Art School in New York in
the 1930s and died in 1975. She was impressed by Gorky, and she and
her husband started collecting his works. Some they received as gifts,
others were purchased.

All of them are early pieces, and many, to add to the air of mystery
around the show, remain untitled and of uncertain date. One is a
fabulously delicate, softly modeled portrait in pencil on brown
construction paper. Another is a painting, based on one by Metzger
herself, on cardboard.

Gorky,
improvised media like these, was hard-up. Three of the works have been
painted or drawn on two sides. In one case, the image on the reverse
was painted upside down, making a mounted display in the middle of the
room, with both sides visible, somewhat impractical. Museum director
Michael H. Lally has solved the dilemma by taking the unusual step of
hanging a photographic reproduction of the reverse side beside the
original.

Artistically, Gorky was not quite `Gorky” in these years. He was
still toying with the various styles and idioms of his modernist
predecessors in Europe, especially Picasso, Matisse, and Miró.

Unlike most Americans, even in the art world, Metzger was tuned in to
such influences: She frequently accompanied her husband on business
trips to Europe, where she kept abreast of developments in modern
art. All this helps account for her responsiveness to Gorky’s
work. But his personality may have played an even bigger part.

Born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, Gorky had come to the United States in
1920 as a teenage survivor of the Armenian genocide. His mother died
of starvation in his arms. `The harsh struggles and terrible suffering
of his early life in Armenia,” write Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in
their biography of Gorky’s friend, Willem de Kooning, `gave him an
ancient, fated air that he was not afraid to cultivate; he sometimes
seemed to play the part of an Old Testament figure who happened to be
in New York.”

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