Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

PERSPECTIVE

Philadelphia City Paper (Philadelphia, PA)
November 16, 2009

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art
history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass
team. His column, `Perspective,’ will run monthly in this space,
bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive
in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

To Be or Not to Be ¦

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
Picas 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.

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.

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
per idence 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.

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 he 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.

lmass/2009/11/16/perspective_arshile_gorky

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress