EXHIBITS: SHOW EXPLORES GORKY’S ABSTRACT ART
By Martin Gayford
Reading Eagle
92
Feb 22 2010
LONDON – Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) had a tragic life and a poignantly
short career as a mature artist. It seems hardhearted, therefore, to
say that the new retrospective of his work at Tate Modern is too big,
all the more since Gorky was, at his best, a great painter.
On the evidence of this London show, his work is a case in which fewer
exhibits would have meant more impact. Almost half the exhibition is
over before we reach his breakthrough into originality in the early
1940s. Several rooms are filled with his emulations of Paul Cezanne,
Pablo Picasso, Jean Miro and others. While everyone has influences,
this makes a discouraging beginning.
After these long struggles to find himself as a painter came a period
in which, along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky was
at the forefront of the most exciting movement in art. He invented
a novel type of abstraction, or near-abstraction: loose and free,
yet filled with floating objects, sexual, organic and mysterious. The
effect is of a psychological magic garden, with hints of the Anatolian
countryside of his childhood.
One of the most glorious is the Tate’s own "Waterfall" (1943),
sparked off by a period in the countryside of Connecticut after
decades in New York. Looking at it, you accept it as a landscape,
though Gorky has actually described almost no actual object in paint,
let alone a waterfall.
Like a character in Greek mythology, from which he took his adopted
first name "Arshile," the Russian form of "Achilles," he seemed
pursued by the fates. Afflicted with cancer, he lost the work of an
entire year in a studio fire, and was later injured in a car accident.
Gorky feared he might be unable to paint again, and on July 21, 1948,
he hanged himself.
The critic Clement Greenberg remarked that Gorky had his greatest
pictures to come.
He was Born Vosdanig Adoian at some point between 1902 and 1905,
in the Armenian area of what was then Ottoman Turkey.
In 1915, he and his family fled the massacres then taking place in
Turkey. he later took the name "Gorky" in homage to the revolutionary
writer, Maxim Gorky.