ARSHILE GORKY: AN OLD WORLD NEWLY MINTED TATE MODERN IS RIGHT TO CHAMPION THIS ENIGMATIC MODERNIST WHO, AFTER TRAGIC BEGINNINGS, REINVENTED HIMSELF IN AMERICA
The Times/uk
February 9, 2010
I doubt the name Arshile Gorky will spring to mind when you think
of the great American Modernists. Art history tends to make a broad
leap from the most feted figures of turn-of-the-century Paris to the
monumental abstractions of such postwar American pioneers as Willem
de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Gorky gets missed out,
treated at best like some explanatory stepping stone, at worst
like the guest who turns up at the party to discover that he hasn’t
been given a place. It’s at least 20 years since a show of his work
was brought to Britain, and although Tate Modern’s 1943 Waterfall,
a gushing tumble of mossy greens and shining yellows, is enough to
whet any appetite, you have probably seldom seen more than a couple
of his canvases together at any one time.
Biographers seem more fascinated than curators by this oddly
unplaceable figure. Three different studies have been published in
the past decade. But then Gorky’s life story comes straight from high
romance. A little dark-haired boy, born Manoug Adoian in about 1902
(the details as so frequently with Gorky are imprecise) on the shores
of Lake Van in Armenia, he was abandoned as a child by his father.
Then he witnessed the Turkish-perpetrated genocide of his people and
suffered the terrible famine that killed his mother before, at the
age of 17, fleeing his homeland to arrive in America in 1920 where
he set about creating for himself a new life.
Aware of the power of dramatic selfpresentation, he adopted the
pseudonym Arshile Gorky, the first name possibly being the Russian for
Achilles, the second taken as a homage to the great Russian dramatist
and political activist whom he would claim as a cousin (perhaps
unaware that Maxim Gorky had been only a pen name in the first place)
and set about forging a mysterious new persona for himself.
Life and legend are intractably tangled in the story of the tall,
gaunt and somberly handsome immigrant who, known as much for his
striking appearance, his quixotic humour and his passionate liaisons
as for his uncompromising talent, became a pivotal figure in the
emergent art scene of 1930s America. But tragedy lay in wait. In his
early forties, abandoned by his Bostonian wife, separated from his
children, humiliated by the indignities of rectal cancer, his neck
broken by a car crash, he slashed his last canvas with a knife before
removing his neck brace and hanging himself. His already broken spine
snapped easily.
Gorky left an extraordinary and tantalising image behind him but
it would mean little without that other more important legacy:
his paintings. It is a wonderful, sensuous, vital and profoundly
unique talent that Tate Modern now celebrates as it plays host to
the travelling show Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective. Through a huge
exhibition of some 150 works, including not just his most famous
canvases but early works, designs for murals, preparatory drawings
and even a small group of sculptures, the Tate will offer visitors
a proper chance to assess the importance of this figure. They will
see that he is not just the artist who, bridging the divide between
Surrealism and Abstraction, paved the way for Abstract Expressionism,
but also a virtuoso whose works are as subtly convoluted and intensely
passionate as his life.
Gorky would return again and again to his canvases, developing and
extending his ideas, adapting old images or creating new versions,
painting both abstract and figurative pieces at once, until it becomes
all but impossible to tell where a work begins and where it ends. Had
Gorky lived, would he have pulled out half the pictures that we now
see and started work on them again?
This retrospective is an accumulation rather than a chronology. The
exhibition begins not at earliest beginnings with Gorky copying
Old Masters but with a self-taught painter, transfixed by the great
European moderns, sitting in the museums of America staring at works
by Cezanne, by Matisse and Picasso, learning to look at his world
through their eyes. Seen individually, these early paintings are so
derivative as to be almost pastiche. But now, looked at together,
the earliest beginnings of a unique vision can be spotted.
The exhibition shows Gorky struggling through the Depression, reduced
to drawing in ink on paper in his mysterious 1931-32 Nighttime, Enigma
and Nostalgia series, or discovering a new freedom as he looks at the
Surrealists and, playing with ideas of automatism (drawing straight
from the subconscious), finds a fresh spontaneity. In a wonderfully
vibrant series of landscapes he leaves the congested surfaces of
his earlier pictures behind him. For the first time he works in
thin layers and washes of colour, weaving childhood memories with
natural description and erotic fantasy, blending the figurative and
the abstract. These are the works that bridge the two halves of the
show, leading Gorky away from his assiduous apprenticeship into an
exuberant maturity.
The visitor is left in no doubt of Gorky’s art-historical importance.
Here is a painter who, almost single-handedly, carried the baton of
Modernism across the Atlantic opening up a bleak mid-Twenties New
York to new possibilities. Andre Breton described him as "the only
painter in America" and de Kooning, when asked about his artistic
origins, replied that they lay in 36 Union Square: the address of
Gorky’s studio in Greenwich Village.
But don’t spend too much time trying to work out the timeline. Some of
Modernism’s loveliest paintings are right in front of your eyes. As
you enter the show, stepping into the first of a long sequence of
galleries, you see at the far end, framed like an altarpiece, one
of Gorky’s most compelling and poignant works: one of the two big
double portraits (the first in warm rose and saffron and terracotta,
the second in pale golds and ochres and greens) that he painted from
a photograph of himself as a boy standing beside his mother. These
are monuments to the woman who died of starvation in his arms.
Hasten in their direction. This is very much a show of two halves. The
first is interesting and explanatory. But the second is the home of
the great modern masterpieces. Gorky’s two versions of The Artist
and His Mother, both of them returned to obsessively again and again
for almost 20 years, can be analysed as assimilations of all he has
learnt. They have been likened to Ingres for polished translucency,
to Egyptian funerary art for hieratic pose, to Cezanne for flat
composition, to Armenian manuscripts for pattern, to Picasso for
design. But in the end, they are all Gorky’s own. And they haunt the
spectator. What have they seen, those black eyes that stare out at
the spectator? What memories lie in their solemn depths?
The second half of this show might be seen as a revelation. In room
after room Gorky’s greatest works unfurl: How My Mother’s Embroidered
Apron Unfolds in My Life, Water of the Flowery Mill, One Year the
Milkweed, Diary of a Seducer, Agony. Few are missing, though among
those that are is The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, represented only by a
preparatory sketch. There are enough great paintings for every visitor
to get a chance to look at one long and hard, which is what I would
recommend, rather than trying to get a brief glimpse of them all.
Gorky’s paintings are all but impossible to describe and their
titles are hardly a help. But the visitor bears witness to a talent
of extraordinary fecundity, of vibrant intensity and tantalising
elusiveness. Everywhere you can decipher references to his life:
to the colours of his homeland; the abstracted patterns of Armenian
carpets; the pictures of the clogs that his father gave him before
finally abandoning him; the convulsive forms of bodies heaped into
mass graves. But as soon as you think you have found a buried clue
it dissolves away. The longer you gaze into their glowing layers the
more enigmatic they become.
These paintings transcend the particular to speak of something more
profound. Their power lies in this fundamental elusiveness. They
might not bring you much closer to knowing who Gorky really was. But
you certainly won’t forget him after this show.
Filmmaker Atom Egoyanmaker explains how he tried to solve the riddle
of Arshile Gorky
It’s easy to be fascinated by Arshile Gorky. As the most famous
survivor of the Armenian genocide, and certainly one of the most
influential artists of the last century, his reputation has grown
to mythic proportions in the decades since his death in 1948. Yet in
many ways Gorky began his extraordinary career with a self-made myth
that was never explained to those closest to him.
In researching my 2002 film Ararat I decided to make Gorky a character
in my movie. In studying his life I pored over an abundance of material
relating to the artist, including excellent books by Nouritza Matossian
(whom I quoted in the film), Matthew Spender, and Hayden Herrera.
None of these biographers has ever come up with a definitive reason
as to why Gorky changed his name, though each has considered theories
and possible explanations.
Gorky’s own nephew, Karlen Mooradian, had forged a series of purported
letters in the 1950s from Gorky to his sister (Karlen’s mother),
which defended the decision in an emotionally convincing way.
Mooradian’s myth was that his famous uncle had been so infused with
the love of Armenian history and language by his powerful mother
that he felt he could never live up to its lofty standards. In short,
he changed his name to take the burden of his cultural heritage off
his shoulders. An interesting theory, if it were true.
When Mooradian’s beautifully written letters were proven to be forged,
I found myself in a state of shock. After all, my wife, Arsinee,
and I had named our son Arshile. I had made a short film in the
mid-1990s explaining our decision to name our son after an artist
who had changed his name based on the haunting account supposedly
left by the great man himself.
In the vacuum created by this tremor of forgery, we are left with
these facts. Gorky said that he was related to the great Russian
writer Maxim Gorky. His fellow artists and thinkers in New York
believed him. There is much speculation as to the origins of the
name Arshile, and I won’t repeat the ideas that are discussed in the
existing literature. Suffice it to say that nothing is conclusive.
The reason Gorky decided to create a new persona for himself remains
mysterious. What can be understood is that he saw his community
wiped out in the first act of modern genocide, and then witnessed
this monstrous crime being denied by its Ottoman Turkish perpetrators.
Is it possible that the trauma of this catastrophic experience forced
Gorky to deny his true identity?