THE TRAGIC LIFE AND EXQUISITE ART OF GORKY

Wall Street Journal
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Feb 11 2010

London: The tale of the painter Arshile Gorky’s life (c. 1904-48) was
a tragedy. Fleeing the 1915 Armenian massacres, he arrived in America
in 1920 and falsely reinvented himself as the cousin of the Russian
writer, Maxim Gorky. In 120 paintings and works on paper, Tate Modern’s
"Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" tracks the rise and premature fall
of a great artist. The exhibition is the first major one in Europe
for 20 years, and the most moving show I have seen in a long time.

TATE Arshile Gorky’s ‘Waterfall’ (1943) .

There is an entire room of the flat, large portraits for which this
Abstract Expressionist is, paradoxically, best known. These include two
versions of the 9-year-old, dark-eyed boy with the head-scarf-wearing,
blankly staring woman, "The Artist and his Mother," that use his
characteristic palette of chocolate brown, petrol blue, Chinese orange,
and pink-mauve.

But as he was finishing these in the late 1930s and ’40s he was also
making his exquisitely complicated drawings and painting abstract
biomorphic forms, sometimes hard-edged, sometimes rendered with
thinned washes of paint. Some of them look as though he’s spread a
veil of color over the picture plane and cut shapes in it, through
which are revealed the odd things going on underneath. Strange,
that a single artist was painting these accomplished realist works
and such radical abstracts at the same time.

Until May 3

.There was a brief blissful period — starting in 1941 with his
marriage to Agnes Magruder ("Mougouch") and then the birth of his two
daughters — when he flirted with Surrealism but worked outside, in
the landscape. The epitome of this is the Tate’s own 1943 masterpiece,
"Waterfall."

But in 1948, this giant personality was overwhelmed by cancer,
clinical depression and serious injuries in a car crash; and with a
scrawled note "Goodbye My Loveds," Gorky hanged himself.

–Paul Levy