HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

BigThink.com
Feb 10 2010

I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile
Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops,
he watched his mother starve to death in 1919 surrounded by fellow
refugees. Upon coming to America, he shed his birth name of Vosdanig
Adoian and remade himself as Arshile Gorky, taking the same last name
as his hero, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had supported the
Armenian cause.

After years of success as an artist, the stretch from 1946 through
1948 became a sheer hell–a studio fire, rectal cancer, his wife’s
infidelity, a car accident resulting in a broken neck and paralyzed
painting arm–ceased only by his suicide. The Tate Modern’s exhibition
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective brings the pain, of course, but also
the triumph of a man who never truly left his mother country while
bringing modernism to his new one.

Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother seems an odd choice at first glance
for a retrospective of an artist known best for his proto-Abstract
Expressionist and -Surrealist work. But, as Kim Servart Theriault
writes in the masterful catalogue, "Gorky’s predicament as an
immigrant and the trajectory of his development as an artist were
quintessentially modern and indicative of an American experience
that critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg would
codify in the 1950s." The magpie of modernism, Gorky took a little
bit from everyone, including Picasso, whose classical phase influenced
Gorky’s resurrection of his mother in paint. Working from a cherished
photograph of himself and his mother before their travails, Gorky
made a realistic work in a modernist vein. As Jody Patterson writes
in her essay, "[M]odernist strategies were deemed to be the only ones
appropriate to a realist engagement with the contemporary world." When
you live in a world of unreasoning cruelty, Surrealism and other modern
"isms" seem the logical choice.

In the context of "New Deal" WPA murals Gorky painted in 1935 through
1937, Patterson sees a much more politically engaged Gorky than
previously suspected. "Within a public and highly visible federal
commission," Patterson believes, Gorky "managed to execute a cycle of
murals that engaged modernist forms in a sophisticated reconception
of realism, while also, albeit subtly, expressing his solidarity
with fellow artists on the left." Still leery of political pogroms,
Gorky kept his politics on the down low while paradoxically painting
them on a large scale–hidden in plain sight. The apolitical artist
of the past gives way in this exhibition to a passionate prophet
railing against injustice, but quietly.

Gorky, however, never allowed politics to overpower his passion for
art. "[T]hrough a patient and sustained study of the history of art
through reproductions in magazines and books and repeated trips to
museums and galleries in New York and other East Coast Cities," writes
Michael R. Taylor, Gorky "voraciously absorbed the techniques of the
painters he discovered," perhaps foremost among them, Cezanne. At the
Cezanne and Beyond exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last
year, Taylor counted Gorky among Cezanne’s children, calling Gorky’s
works in the exhibition an amuse bouche for this retrospective, which
appeared at the PMA before the Tate Modern. Just as Gorky feasted
at the buffet of art history, visitors to the exhibition can sample
from the bounty of styles Gorky tasted and digested before moving on
to the next thing that caught his eye.

Gorky the insatiable student evolved into Gorky the mesmerizing
teacher. Gorky’s "encyclopedic understanding of the history of
Western painting, from Paolo Uccello to Cezanne," Taylor writes, "far
surpassed that of his better-educated peers in the fledgling American
avant-garde." At the New School of Design, Gorky counted Mark Rothko
among his students, but countless other artists took from Gorky’s
storehouse of knowledge to find their own way. This retrospective
proves that Arshile Gorky still has much left to teach us about the
uses of modernism. Sadly, ethnic cleansing remains alive and well in
our day, a century after Gorky lost his mother to Turkish cruelty.

Gorky’s art reminds us of that tragic past and continues to point
towards a future free of the madness that makes surrealism seem sane.

[Image: Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926-36, 152.4
x 127 cm. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art (New York,
USA). © Arshile Gorky Estate.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review
copy of the catalogue to and to the Tate Modern for the image above
from the exhibition, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, running until
May 9, 2010.]