Arshile Gorky exhibition at the Tate Modern

The Sunday Times
January 10, 2010

The Armenian-born artist best known for his tragic life, has his
pioneering work showcased at the Tate Modern next month
The Artist and His Mother, (1926-36), by Arshile Gorky

A photograph of the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky

Mark Hudson

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In February 1948, the American magazine Life ran a photospread on the
Glass House, a modernist farmhouse conversion in rural Connecticut.
Sitting hunched by one of the wide windows is a male figure, his dark
hair rather long for the period, face averted – referred to in the
caption simply as the house’s tenant, `Arshile Gorky, an artist’. To
anyone even slightly acquainted with American art, that figure will be
of infinitely greater interest than the house.

Yet the evasive posture is significant. A vivid presence on the New
York art scene for nearly three decades, Gorky has remained elusive in
death as he was in life. The question of whether he was the progenitor
of the great age of American painting – which gave the world Pollock
and Rothko – or simply an imitative quasi-surrealist or even a
misplaced Eurasian folk artist remains open. What isn’t in dispute is
his status as one of the most tragic artists of the 20th century. Five
months after this photograph was taken, he hanged himself in a nearby
shed.

`Gorky saw things differently from other people,’ says his widow,
Mougouch, pointing to a vigorous semi-abstract drawing on her sitting
room wall. `For him, clouds and trees were full of threatening forces.
As you walked around with him, you realised what you were seeing was
completely different to what he was seeing.’ In another drawing,
hanging in a corner of the room, is the pale, almost ghostly image of
the other great female presence in Gorky’s life, her placid, wide-eyed
features framed by a headscarf – his mother.

The image is one of many Gorky produced from a photograph he kept
close to him at all times. It shows the artist’s 12-year-old self
looking gravely out at us from his mother’s side. In some of these
images, the mother appears serene; in others, there’s a sense of
barely concealed anxiety. The greatest of them, large paintings
hanging in the Whitney Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of
Art, Washington DC, are considered American masterpieces, icons of the
immigrant experience. Yet Gorky never talked about the circumstances
surrounding them.

On arriving in New York in the early 1920s, Gorky let it be understood
that he was Russian, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky, and that he
had studied under Kandinsky in Paris. To the end of his life, many of
his closest friends were uncertain about his origins. In fact, he was
born Vostanig Manuk Adoian in an Armenian village in eastern Turkey,
circa 1900. The stories Gorky told of an idyllic village childhood –
of bread baking in village ovens, brilliant red poppies, incandescent
moons – weren’t entirely fabricated, but they referred only to his
earliest years, before he and his mother and sisters moved to the
local capital, Van.

He never discussed the fact that he was present during the siege of
Van in the early stages of the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, in which
between 1m and 2m people were killed; that, at the age of 15, he
walked, along with the rest of the city’s Armenian population, to
Yerevan, in Russian Armenia, with many dying on the eight-day march;
or that his mother subsequently died of malnutrition during a famine
that killed a third of the city’s population.

Gorky and his sister Vartush made their way to America, where Gorky
set about turning himself into an artist, educating himself piecemeal
at various institutions in New York and Boston while taking menial
jobs. He used the pseudonym Arshile Gorky for the first time in 1924.

Tall, with a drooping moustache – `walking back and forth with
intricate dance steps, telling long, fanciful tales of his boyhood in
Russia’, as one former student remembered him – Gorky was widely
considered phoney, but in that city of immigrants and self-invention,
it hardly mattered.

His early work was painfully derivative of other artists: first,
Cézanne, then Picasso, Léger and Miro. By the 1930s, however, Gorky
had had some commercial success in an art scene that still looked to
Europe for leadership, where the artists who would make New York the
global art capital two decades later – the Pollocks and Rothkos – were
footling around with provincial variants on surrealism and social
realism. `De Kooning was just an inarticulate guy who cleaned Arshile
Gorky’s brushes,’ one observer claimed.

Yet Gorky evaded every attempt to pin down his ideas and intentions,
even discouraging his students from taking notes in class. `He may
have felt that clarifications and explanations would lead back to the
truth about his past,’ says his son-in-law and biographer, Matthew
Spender. `And since he felt nobody else could understand what he’d
been through, that was something he could never discuss.’

Gorky’s brief first marriage and subsequent relationships foundered on
his simultaneous obsession with work and morbid fear of betrayal.
Then, in 1941, he met a striking 19-year-old art student, Agnes
Magruder, an admiral’s daughter and former debutante, who was to
become his wife and partner for the rest of his life. He named her
Mougouch, an Armenian term of endearment.

`We met at a party,’ she recalls. `I’d been warned that he’d sing and
dance and take the whole place over. But this tall, dark man came and
sat beside me, and said absolutely nothing. Then, at the end of the
evening, he asked me if I’d have coffee with him.’

A slight but well-preserved 86-year-old, she pulls ruminatively on a
roll-up as she looks back nearly 70 years. `I’d been trying to paint
myself, and he encouraged me to continue. But I realised I had nothing
to say. What he was doing seemed infinitely more interesting than
anything I could ever do.’

The couple’s meeting coincided with a new unleashing of energy in
Gorky’s work. At last, he had found his own path, in passionate
responses to the New England woods and fields, seen on his in-laws’
farm, which echoed in some way the Armenian landscapes in his mind –
captured in luscious, lyrical and apparently completely abstract
paintings. This sense of liberation was the result, at least in part,
of the influence of the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. A charismatic
self-publicist, one of a wave of European modernists who had arrived
in New York on the outbreak of war, Matta became a close friend of
Gorky, introducing him to the surrealist technique of `automatic’ or
completely spontaneous painting. `He told Gorky not to try so hard,’
Mougouch says. `He told him, just do it. Let yourself go.’

Yet things were never easy. There was constant worrying about money, a
continual moving between the houses of wealthier friends and Gorky’s
New York studio, which wasn’t big enough to contain the couple and the
two daughters who arrived in quick succession.

It was in early 1946, however, that the sense of disaster began to
escalate. First, Gorky’s studio burnt down, with the loss of about 20
important paintings; then he was diagnosed with cancer, and underwent
an immediate colostomy. Physically weakened, he went on painting
furiously, though he feared he was being left behind by a changing art
world.

`American art was coming into its own,’ Spender says. `America had won
the war, and it wanted to show something completely new to the world.
The New York artists were staking out their territories in this new
dispensation. Gorky couldn’t do that. He was incapable of politicking
and intrigue.’

His mood swings became more severe. `He got irritated with me,’
Mougouch says. `He adored the children, but he got irritated with the
noise they made. He was growing weaker, and he was frightened.’ Unable
to discuss his Armenian background, even when his father died,
inhibited in discussing his ideas by what he saw as his lack of formal
education, but with a free-spirited wife, 20 years his junior, and two
boisterous children dependent on him, Gorky felt frustrated and
humiliated at every turn.

On June 17, 1948, while Gorky was working in New York, Mougouch left
the children with a childminder and spent several days with Matta, who
lived only 40 miles from the Glass House. When Gorky learnt of their
fling, he summoned Matta to a meeting in Central Park and threatened
him physically. Matta managed to calm Gorky, but his artistic standing
was permanently harmed by the disclosure of the affair.

A week later, Gorky broke his neck in a car accident. The driver, his
dealer, Julian Levy, was apparently drunk. Forced to wear a cumbersome
neck brace, which restricted his painting arm, Gorky was now suicidal.

In mid-July 1948, Mougouch departed with the children for her parents’
house in Virginia, writing to a friend that `the situation is
untenable, and I can no longer hold on’. Gorky’s body was found a week
later, hanging in a shed near the house. On a beam, he had written:
`Goodbye My Loveds.’

What one critic referred to disparagingly as the `canonisation’ of
Gorky by the New York art world began almost immediately. The
sustained invention of his final years, maintained through every
adversity, can be seen as one of the transcendent achievements of
20th-century art. Yet his status and significance have remained
uncertain, particularly in Britain, which has never, Spender claims,
quite taken to Gorky. This situation will be rectified by the Tate’s
spectacular show, in which Mougouch has been closely involved. `When I
think of Gorky, I think about my life beginning,’ she says. `I rarely
think of my life before then. For me, it all began with Gorky.’

Arshile Gorky, Tate Modern, SE1, February 10-May 3

Mark Hudson is the author of Titian, the Last Days (Bloomsbury)