Arshile Gorky: The Shape Shifter

Time Magazine
Monday, Nov. 09, 2009

By Richard Lacayo

Is there another life in American art to compare to Arshile Gorky’s? His arc
from struggle to breakthrough to tragedy is slow, then swift, then dazzling
and finally devastating. In the seven or so years before he took his life in
1948, he produced some of the greatest, most explosive works of the 20th
century, a synthesis of Surrealism and abstraction that unlocked voluptuous
new possibilities for painting and opened the way to Abstract Expressionism.
It wasn’t a long life, but it was lit by fire.

Though it’s been almost three decades since the last Gorky retrospective,
the big new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was worth the wait.
Organized by Michael R. Taylor, the museum’s curator of modern art, it has
final galleries so triumphant, you want to throw your hat in the air, even
though you know ? and how could you forget? ? that this is a story that will
end where it began, in darkness. (Watch TIME’s video about Arshile Gorky.)

Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian in Khorkom, a village in Turkish Armenia. In
his early 20s he adopted a new name ? Arshile (Russian for Achilles) Gorky
(in homage to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky). He may not have known that
gorky means bitter in Russian, but he was certainly acquainted with
bitterness. He had arrived in New York City in 1920 as an 18-year-old
refugee from the Turkish campaign of atrocities against Armenians. One year
earlier, his mother had died of starvation in his arms. In adulthood, from
1926 to 1942, he obsessively reworked two haunting double portraits that
showed them side by side ? he the tentative 10-year-old; she an impassive
totem, forever out of reach beneath waves of nostalgia.

All through his 20s and 30s, Gorky devoted himself to a complete, nearly
self-annihilating immersion in the work of one master after another.
Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, Léger ? he sometimes channeled their voices like a
ventriloquist’s dummy, but he learned their language. His breakthrough came
in the 1940s, partly by way of his contact with the Surrealists in wartime
exile in New York City, especially André Breton and Roberto Matta. Gorky had
been borrowing Surrealist imagery for years, and he flourished in their
company. It was through Matta that he renewed his interest in the Surrealist
notion of automatism, a means of relinquishing conscious control of the hand
to let it discover images that flowed from the unconscious. With that, some
key turned inside him, allowing him to translate impressions of nature and
the body and childhood memories of Armenia into an abstract language of
longing and release. (See TIME’s photo-essay "Cézanne and Beyond.")

Where once there had been something congested and strenuous about Gorky’s
paint application, his clotted surfaces began to give way to Matta’s thin
washes of color. And now there’s a slender, buoyant new line that darts all
around the canvas, lightly defining swelling forms, with borders as thin as
soap bubbles’, just tight enough to create a sense of release when bursts of
red or yellow pop them. You sense that this is the bouncing, eternal line of
freedom and pleasure, one that traces back to the airborne arcs of those
young women on swings in Fragonard.

For most of his last years, Gorky went from strength to strength, making
lush, abundant pictures like The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, his 1944
masterpiece in which pools of color supply a world where turbulent figures
claw the air. But once the bad times began, they never quit. In 1946 a fire
in his Connecticut studio destroyed more than 20 paintings. Then came rectal
cancer and a car accident that left his painting arm temporarily
immobilized. Then his wife left him, taking the kids. In despair and
constant pain, he hanged himself. He was only 46 ? a short life, but long
enough to be a hinge that history turned on.

Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art and architecture at
time.com/lookingaround

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