PERSPECTIVE: ARSHILE GORKY RETROSPECTIVE AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

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Philadelphia Citypaper –
Nov 16 2009

A retrospective exhibition should be more than just the collection
and display of work from the lifetime of an artist. It should also be
necessary in some way, whether due to changes in critical approaches to
art history, new scholarship on the artist’s life and work, hitherto
unknown or unseen works that revise the existing inventory of the
artist, or a new curatorial approach. "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective,"
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an august example of a proper
retrospective — almost 30 years has elapsed since the last large
gathering of Gorky’s work, and it is clearly time for another look.

Michael R. Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, never chooses his
exhibitions lightly — he is a curator and an art historian when
he tackles his projects (this one was five years in the making). For
Taylor, it’s not just about looking at art; it’s about asking questions
that a retrospective can hopefully answer. With three new biographies
about Gorky, as well as revisions to the study and understanding of the
development of modern American abstraction and surrealism in recent
decades, Taylor recognized that it was time to revisit the artist’s
life and work, and the show delivers grandly. It is a visual spectacle
— a feast for the eyes, and also a provocative reconsideration of one
of the most talented and self-driven painters in American modern art.

It’s hard to go wrong with an artist like Gorky. His long periods
of self-imposed apprenticeships with artists such as Cézanne and
Picasso clearly paid off; his ability to absorb the modern languages
of pictorial structure and the handling of paint and color stands
out among his contemporaries. It’s not that he is better — he
is different. I don’t know of any other modern artist who enacted
apprenticeships with recent and current "masters" and stayed closely
dedicated to them for such long and intensive periods of study. Gorky
works like an academic within a modern vocabulary, and Taylor’s
curatorial decisions expose his artistic process during the course of
the exhibition. The drawings and paintings in the "Nighttime, Enigma,
and Nostalgia" series from 1931-34, for example, guide viewers from an
inspirational source by Giorgio de Chirico to a final painted solution
unleashed almost entirely from where the artist began (observing this
creative track should push aside any accusations by his detractors of
a lack of individuality or originality in Gorky’s "apprenticeships").

It’s obvious that Gorky’s craft is a labor of love at all times. His
work invites viewers to relish in the details — the way he turns
and molds colors together, builds edges, and gracefully drags a liner
brush across the canvas with linear elegance. Gorky knows how to paint,
and as a disciplined "student" his time was well spent.

philamuseum.org Organization, by Arshile Gorky, oil on canvas, 1933-36.

Add to this formal expertise a tale of personal struggle and
contradictions — the tragic death of his mother in his arms as a
young boy in Armenia on a forced march during the Turkish genocide,
the fabrication of an artistic pedigree that included a stint with
Kandinsky in Paris, a changing of identity (his birth name was
Vosdanig Adoian and he "became" Russian when he arrived in New York
in 1924), and then a series of calamitous events involving betrayal,
abandonment, personal injury and eventual suicide — and there is
a dramatic show in the making. But Taylor does not rest on Gorky’s
artistic and biographical laurels. Instead he brings forth new
and challenging ideas about the artist, gleaned from research into
archival materials and personal interviews with Gorky’s relatives
and friends. The catalog, a collection of essays by several authors,
covers new scholarly ground — exploring the artist’s political
leanings, the possibility that his masqueraded identity served as a
coping mechanism for trauma and immigrant cultural adjustment, while
also presenting new insights into his murals for the Newark airport in
1936-37 and his methods of reaching a finalized painterly composition.

The most significant contribution of the exhibition is Taylor’s
revisionist examination of Gorky’s legacy within modern art. In short,
he suggests that the posthumous writings emphasizing Gorky’s importance
to American abstract art overshadowed his continuing dedication
to European surrealism. Publications that celebrated the artist’s
position as an "early master" of Abstract Expressionism, writings by
American critics that attacked surrealism, the return of many of his
surrealist friends to Europe, as well as later falsified letters by
Gorky’s nephew in which the "artist" disparaged surrealism and replaced
its importance with a celebration of Armenian art, all contributed to
Gorky being written into history without sufficient acknowledgement
of his interest in and dedication to Breton’s surrealism in the 1940s.

philamuseum.org Central Park at Dusk, by Arshile Gorky, oil on canvas,
1936-42 Taylor’s view does not deny Gorky’s important influence on
the next generation of American painters. What it illustrates is
that part of his artistic approach was unseen by artists and critics
(namely his preparatory studies and drawings), and therefore what
seemed like spontaneous acts of painting were in actuality more aligned
with surrealist practices of automatism and even earlier academic art,
where the final composition was transferred to the canvas only after
the majority of formal issues were resolved. This artistic approach and
his continued friendships with Breton and other surrealists during the
1940s conflicts with the promotion of the artist as a proto-Abstract
Expressionist by curators, critics and art historians in the decades
immediately following his death. Taylor’s critique of how Gorky
has been written into American modern art history is polemical but
convincing, and the evidence presented in the catalog is persuasive.

The visual evidence for Taylor’s claims is displayed in the largest
room at the far back of the exhibition hall. The influence of Gorky’s
surrealist artist-friend Roberto Matta, who guided him into automatism
and demonstrated how to thin paints to create spatial washes and
expressive effects, combines with an immersion in nature that opens a
wellspring in Gorky’s art during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The
focus on artistic inspiration through nature in the room reveals
a psychic nostalgia via surrealism that carried Gorky back to the
pre-tragic years of his childhood on his father’s farm in Armenia. A
series of drawings made in 1943 at his mother-in-law’s rural home in
Lincoln, Va., teem with energetic color and line and contain imagery
that hovers somewhere between visible and intuitive perception. The
decision to place this period of work, Gorky’s best, in the farthest
interior space makes curatorial sense, since the viewer then "turns
back" into a second long series of rooms that lead through the work
from the last years of the artist’s life. Surrealism becomes the
"pivot" in the exhibition, and the room containing the major works
of the early 1940s elicits a world of colliding dualities: color and
line, abstraction and visible subject matter, beauty in nature and
destruction in war, and joy and despair in Gorky’s personal life.

Surrealism thrives on convulsive forces such as these, if an artist
is able to reconcile them into a greater whole — Gorky can, and did.

philamuseum.org The Artist and His Mother, by Arshile Gorky, oil on
canvas, 1926-36 At his public lecture, Taylor described a successful
retrospective exhibition as one that unfolds like a drama through a
series of acts.

Could there be another artist more fitting for a Shakespearean tragedy
than Arshile Gorky? Innocence, love, loss, struggle, betrayal, brief
moments of elation — it is all there. The PMA retrospective takes
audiences on a curatorial journey in five acts: tragic beginnings in
Armenia, pseudo-fathering through Cézanne, mentorship with Picasso,
self-realization through Nature and Surrealism, and a tragic downfall
that ends, as Shakespeare’s works so often do, in the untimely death
of the protagonist. Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother is the great
soliloquy in this tragedy, relegated (fittingly) to a tangential room
in the early section of the exhibition. We exit the chronological
narrative briefly and stand suspended in time in a chapel-like space,
gaining privileged access to the private life and inner thoughts
of an artist otherwise veiled by his fabricated public persona and
abstract visual language. It seems impossible to imagine the power
this image, based on a photograph taken seven years before the tragic
loss of his mother, held for the artist. One drawing in particular,
from the Art Institute of Chicago, employs subtle shifts in value with
touches of thin but strong lines to evoke the return of his mother,
and you sense that she is almost within reach. Gorky never stopped
working on the images of his mother, as if doing so would somehow
cause her to become a permanent part of his past. And while the elegant
abstractions of the 1940s are for many historians unrivaled in modern
art, observing the tender care and love imbued into these personal
portraits is perhaps the most moving aspect of the entire exhibition.

Like the famous soliloquy in Hamlet so crucial to the outcome of the
tragic narrative, the face of the young boy holding a flower with
his seated mother next to him remain vivid as one moves through the
rest of the exhibition — and the later works seem to make more sense
for it. The Artist and his Mother is a fulcrum for the abstract work
in the show, allowing access behind the formal walls of self-imposed
"apprenticeships" and the veil of surrealist abstraction. It reveals
much about the artist: complicated biographically, a private sufferer,
strangely distant and inaccessible yet powerfully expressive through
formal painting.

The exhibition "curtain" closes with an uplifting testament to the
artist’s creative reach: a painting titled The Limit (1947). Although
Gorky’s last painting (found in progress on his easel when he took his
own life in 1948) is seen nearby, this curatorial decision changes the
tenor of the retrospective from a biographical journey to an artistic
quest for continued innovation through disciplined painterly practice,
even in the face of extreme personal hardship and physical anguish. A
mysteriously liminal abstraction, The Limit suggests a doorway between
the worlds of surrealist automatism and the growing abstract tendencies
in the late 1940s in New York City. When Gorky discussed the painting
with his dealer Julian Levy, he remarked that this was as far as he
was going to push it. Without question, the PMA retrospective reveals
that Gorky always pushed with great force, and even within a short
career his contribution to modern art reached the edge of the possible.