SEEN FROM AN ODD PERSPECTIVE
By Michael Fitzgerald

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December 9, 2009
Philadelphia

In 1949, Willem de Kooning spoke with remarkable humility about his
artistic origins when he wrote that if he came from any one place,
"I come from 36 Union Square." This address in New York’s Greenwich
Village was the modest studio of Arshile Gorky, an artist less widely
known than de Kooning or Jackson Pollock but one of equal stature
and the key figure in the emergence of the New York School.

Arshile Gorky In Context

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through Jan. 10

Much of Gorky’s obscurity stems from the absence of a full
retrospective of his art in the U.S. since the Guggenheim Museum’s in
1981, so the Philadelphia Museum of Art deserves praise for having
assembled a comprehensive exhibition, even though the scrambled
and tendentious installation of the work may prevent many visitors
from following the complex course of Gorky’s development or fully
understanding his accomplishments.

Among mid-century artists, whose lives were often marked by poverty
and depression, Gorky’s stands out as the most challenging of his
generation and one of great relevance to our own time. During the last
decade or so, biographers have brought great clarity to the chaos
of Gorky’s childhood in Turkish Armenia and documented in chilling
detail the impact of the Turkish-perpetrated genocide on his family,
particularly the death of his mother from malnourishment and disease
and the flight of the young Vosdanig Adoian to America in 1920 (he
took the name Arshile Gorky in the 1920s). Not only does Gorky’s case
make tangible the horror of this and other genocides that still shape
our world, but his art remains a potent force for the recognition of
Armenian culture.

Gorky’s art was both a triumph over this devastating past and its
affirmation. Without formal education or setting foot in Europe,
Gorky, in the 1930s, opened dialogues with the work of Cezanne and
Picasso that both defined his standing in modern art and almost
single-handedly transferred the European roots of modernism to New
York. Gorky’s methodical appropriation of other masters’ achievements
in early works not only provocatively questioned assumptions about
originality that have driven much contemporary art, then and now,
but culminated in two versions of "The Artist and His Mother," a pair
of paintings that create transcendent images of Gorky’s vision of his
childhood in Armenia while also celebrating his well-earned place in
the avant-garde. Particularly in the version belonging to the Whitney
Museum, Gorky transformed a photograph of himself as a boy standing
next to his mother into both an iconic image of maternal majesty and
one of familial loss, as mother and son stand close enough to touch
but remain separated by a ribbon of paint.

Like many of Gorky’s major works-including the crucial "Garden in
Sochi" series (1940-43) in which the artist made a great leap toward
investing the nearly abstract imagery of much contemporary painting
with talismans of his heritage-these paintings are present in the
exhibition but not placed to honor their accomplishment or educate
visitors on their meanings. Hung in a small side gallery with low
ceilings and spotlights that nearly overlap their frames, the two
magnificent versions of "The Artist and His Mother" appear almost
trivial. Placed after uncharacteristic murals Gorky painted on a
government commission for Newark airport, the relationship of the
"Sochi" paintings to his previous work is lost.

In an act of disservice to Gorky’s reputation and the experience of
visitors, Michael R. Taylor, the museum’s curator of modern art, has
chosen to emphasize one phase of Gorky’s career over all others in
an attempt to revise scholarly opinion about Gorky’s relationship to
Surrealism, the movement founded by Andre Breton in 1924 to explore the
creative potential of the unconscious. Scholars have long understood
that Gorky was stimulated by Surrealism’s embrace of spontaneity
and psychological conflict, and was flattered when Breton praised
his work. But they have concluded that, like Picasso and Joan Miro,
Gorky remained distant from the dogmatic Surrealism of Breton and
distrustful of Surrealism’s central claim that great work could be
created by chance.

In order to showcase his argument that Surrealism played a far more
important role in Gorky’s development, Mr. Taylor has devoted the
show’s largest gallery to Gorky’s work of the early and mid-1940s. For
once, great pictures such as "The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb" (1944) can
be well seen, though the effect of this sequence of meticulously made
drawings and paintings is to undercut the curator’s proposition that
Gorky was deeply influenced by this movement that famously derided
craft or circumspection. In a few paintings, such as "One Year the
Milkweed" (1944), Gorky did explore the pictorial possibilities
of highly thinned flows of color to beautiful result, yet these
were short-lived experiments that he soon structured with carefully
wrought linear designs. Most of the major paintings Gorky made in his
years of engagement with Surrealism are associated with at least one
extensive preparatory work. Moreover, this dedication to process is
a fundamental principle that knits together Gorky’s varied career.

Even in the main gallery, the installation distracts us from Gorky’s
art by decorating the walls with large undulating patterns Taylor
reclaimed from one of the Surrealists’ group shows in an attempt
to situate Gorky in their midst. The effect is more imprisonment
than liberation.

Such curatorial indulgence might be acceptable if it did not lead
to a misrepresentation of Gorky’s achievements. By emphasizing his
work of the early and mid-1940s, the retrospective leaves the strong
impression that this was his finest period, a conclusion that is almost
inescapable as the exhibition resumes its course through low-ceilinged,
cramped galleries to the end of Gorky’s career.

Gorky committed suicide in July 1948, in his mid-40s, after enduring
cancer surgery, injury in an auto accident, and the destruction of
many recent works by fire in 1946, among a litany of tragedies as
severe as those he faced in childhood. Yet during the final years
of his life he created complex, nuanced series of works that are
widely acknowledged as his greatest art, among them the versions of
"Charred Beloved" (1946), "The Calendars" (1946) and "The Limit"
(1947). In the exhibition catalog and brief wall texts, however, they
are passed over with minimal comment. (The catalog is another lost
opportunity. Its narrowly focused essays cannot fulfill the need for an
updated monograph to succeed Diane Waldman’s for the Guggenheim show.)

In his late paintings and drawings, Gorky returned to the themes
of youth and heritage he had explored in "The Artist and His
Mother." He addressed them with a pictorial mastery he painstakingly
acquired during the previous two decades, creating works that
not only reach beyond his personal experience to fundamental human
experiences-"Agony," "The Betrothal"-but come as close as one can to
brushing these states of being into painterly fields of unsurpassed
subtlety and chromatic force. "The Limit" sums up his achievement:
A thrusting figure, cradling an oval palette (Gorky’s symbol of
creativity), dematerializes into an aqua ground overlaid with strokes
of white. These works are not only the finest achievements of Gorky’s
truncated career; their exploration of the limits of representation
as it infuses abstract expanses of pigment defines a path taken by de
Kooning, the Abstract Expressionist movement and much postwar painting.

-Mr. FitzGerald teaches the history of modern art at Trinity College.