ARSHILE GORKY: A RETROSPECTIVE AT TATE MODERN, REVIEW

The Palestine Telegraph
Feb 10 2010

World, February 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) -The real name of the painter
known to the world as Arshile Gorky was Manoug Adoian. He was born
in the western part of Armenia to a family of prosperous Christian
traders. One morning, when he was about five years old, his father
took his son and daughter to a field by a lake. There they sat on the
ground, sharing a last meal before his father emigrated to America,
where, he promised, they would join him soon. Before kissing his
children goodbye, he presented his son with a pair of pointed wooden
shoes, traditional footwear for Armenian men.

But the years went by and his father didn’t send for them and
didn’t return, in effect abandoning his wife and children not just to
hardship, but to mortal danger. In 1915 the Turks began their campaign
of extermination against Christian Armenians, and more than 1.5 million
people were either massacred or died during deportation. Amid horrific
violence, the young family fled for their lives, making their way
on foot to Russian Armenia 150 miles away. In the winter of 1918-19,
temperatures sometimes dropped to -30C. Manoug’s mother lay down on
the floor of a derelict house and died in the arms of her 15-year-old
son. She had starved to death.

In 1920, through the generosity of a relative, the children reached
America, where in due course the exiled painter would draw on imagery
culled from memories of his boyhood to forge a new language of lyrical
abstraction. It was a long time before he could confront his past,
but when he did he lit the way for two generations of American artists.

To make sense of the magnificent retrospective of his work at Tate
Modern, go straight to gallery seven, where you will find both versions
of The Artist and his Mother, an image that distils the experience of
the millions of immigrants who made their way from the old world to the
new in the early years of the past century. Based on a black-and-white
studio photograph taken in Armenia in 1912, it shows Manoug and
his mother posing stiffly in front of the camera like figures in
a Byzantine icon. The little boy stands like a bridegroom at his
mother’s side, wearing a coat with a velvet collar and shyly holding
a bouquet of flowers. Seated next to him, monumental as a Madonna by
Giotto, his mother wears the traditional Armenian head scarf and long
apron. His round eyes look out pleadingly, hers are full of accusation.

Manoug’s mother had gone to the expense of having the photograph
taken to send to her husband in America, a reminder of his family’s
existence. The person to whom Manoug offers the bouquet is his absent
father. Both versions are unfinished. Was it that Gorky could not bear
to let his mother go a second time? Or did the picture bring back too
many painful memories and too much anger to work on for long periods?

His pseudonym, after all, is the Russian word for "bitter".

At the beginning of his career, Gorky painted dead pastiches of
Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, and Miró, remarkable mainly because
he knew the European modernists he was imitating only through
the few examples of their work he could see in New York, or from
black-and-white reproductions in art magazines. For me, the most
interesting thing about these pictures – far too many of which are
included in the exhibition – is what they tell us about the mind of
the artist, who applied paint to his canvases so thickly that their
surfaces feel airtight, closed shut, lifeless.

In an important series of black-and-white drawings in pencil
and pen-and-ink from the early 1930s called Nighttime, Enigma and
Nostalgia, Gorky combines the biomorphic shapes of Miró and Picasso
with the Surrealist imagery of de Chirico. But Gorky was always a
superb draughtsman, and the most beautiful works in the series are
drawn with dense hatching to create an overall black tonality, from
which amoeba-like organisms that suggest nascent eyes, mouths, lips
and breasts struggle to emerge. For the first time we sense that the
difficult-to-decipher imagery has some deeply personal meaning for
the artist – that it comes from some dead zone of memory and feeling
in his unconscious.

His meeting with the European Surrealist artists in New York in the
early 1940s was the catalyst that enabled him to break free from the
stifling influence of Picasso and Miró. From the moment he found
the courage to look inside himself for his subject matter, he also
found a new painterly freedom. The series Garden in Sochi (1940-41)
is still stylistically dependent on Miró, but its imagery is drawn
from childhood memories – the family’s sunny garden, the butter churn
and plough, a rug, a butterfly, a tree’s branches hung with strips
of fluttering cloth, and the Armenian slipper his father had given
him that long-ago morning.

By unlocking memories of his childhood, Gorky opened himself up to
the world around him. His colour-filled semi-abstract landscapes from
the 1940s are filled with animal, bird and insect life. Their joy and
sensuality reflect the personal happiness he found in marriage and a
new life outside New York. They can combine eroticism and playfulness
with a sometimes sinister undertow that you don’t find elsewhere in
American art from this time.

In Love of the New Gun, for example, he uses swift sweeps of a
brush dipped in grey and black paint with the assurance of a master
calligrapher to summon up a landscape that you just know is alive
with birds and insects. But since their presence is indicated by
a snatch of green plume, a glimpse of yellow breast, a black beak,
or an open wing, it is very hard to say exactly why these incomplete
shapes represent birds. Then you spot the smears and drips of red
paint and the title tells you the rest: this is what remains of the
beautiful creatures the hunter has just shot with his brand new weapon.

In other works, spidery calligraphic lines create biomorphic shapes
that feel as though they are in perpetual movement, while washes,
drips and smears of colour suggest second thoughts and erasures. The
canvas has become a palimpsest in which feelings and memories stir only
to be buried again in an endless cycle of consciousness and repression.

Gorky’s life started and ended in tragedy. Just as he began to
receive critical recognition, a series of personal disasters took
away everything he valued in his life – his work, his health and his
family. First, a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed a lifetime’s
drawings and paintings. Then an operation for cancer that required
a proud, handsome, and fastidious man to wear a colostomy bag broke
his spirit. A late picture entitled Charred Beloved evokes the fire’s
aftermath in black paint over raw canvas. But it is also one of the
most shockingly intimate self-portraits ever painted, for the rivulet
of scarlet paint inside an intestine-shaped blob must refer both to
rectal bleeding and post-operative pain, while black smudges evoke
both human waste and the cancer that had invaded his body and made
him feel unclean. After the collapse of his marriage and a car crash
that left him in agony, he could take no more. On July 20, 1948,
Gorky hanged himself.

What a loss. Gorky was the link between European Surrealism
and American Abstract Expressionism. The passion, enigma and
autobiographical dimension of his work would find their way into the
art of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and, above all, Cy Twombly.

Do go to this show, but be warned that it is huge. Take a look at
the early galleries, but remember that all the best paintings date
from the 1940s.