ELOQUENCE THROUGH IMITATION
By Ariella Budick
FT
November 3 2009 02:00
The case of Arshile Gorky proves that originality doesn’t matter much.
That is hardly surprising: imitation has regularly trumped innovation
throughout the history of art; it would not have occurred to most
medieval window-makers to do something that had never been done
before. The 20th-century avant-garde shared a worship of originality,
yet Gorky, one of its founding brothers, derived most of his style and
imagery from fellow pioneers. To follow his career is to surf waves
of indebtedness to Cezanne, Picasso, Miro, Matta and Tanguy. Their
examples nourished and comforted him.
The Armenian was born Vosdanik Adoian in an Ottoman village on the
shores of Lake Van around 1904. During the Armenian genocide in 1915,
the family was forced out of the region and the boy watched his
mother die of starvation. In 1920, he made his way to the US, where
his father had emigrated a decade earlier. But the teenager soon cut
the relationship off, blaming his father for abandoning the family.
By 1925 he had adopted a colourful pseudonym and a mythic past.
Arshile (or Arshele, as he spelled it then) is Russian for Achilles,
and Maxim Gorky was a literary titan whom the artist claimed as a
cousin – when he wasn’t declaring himself kin to a Georgian prince. An
annual report for New York’s Grand Central School of Art, where he
taught, conveyed that he had been born in Nizhny Novgorod and that he
had graduated from that city’s art school before going on to study at
the Academie Julian in Paris. Gorky was scrupulous about acquiring
prestige by association: he took Picasso’s birth date, October 25,
as his own.
Gorky put his awful past and true ancestry behind him. From the start,
the self-taught artist adopted a parade of father substitutes, men
he never met but whose implicit guidance he abjectly accepted. He
loved these strangers and he learnt to speak their languages with
increasing eloquence.
The first was Cezanne. Fascinated by the Frenchman’s notorious
perseverance in the face of failure, and inspired by his unique
command of spatial relationships, Gorky copied his paintings from
books and public collections. The first room of the show brims with
Cezanne lookalikes, including a slightly surreal rendering of Staten
Island as a suburb of Aix-en-Provence, with eucalyptus trees swaying
between ochre roofs and limpid Mediterranean skies.
By 1927, Gorky had switched allegiances. "I feel Picasso running
through my fingertips," he announced. The stark linearity of the
Spaniard’s neo-classical period inspired "The Artist and his Mother",
Gorky’s tender, tragic self-portrait with the parent who perished
in his arms. Fortunately, he had found himself a fantastically
chameleonic role model, which allowed him to produce a broad range
of tributes. "Organization", for example, is an ambitious reaction
to his idol’s surreal "Studio" of 1927-28. In it, Gorky mimics the
stylistic quirks, the signature distortions, the grid-like structure
and use of black lines to map out the composition. "If he drips,
I drip," Gorky supposedly declared.
As Picasso darted from synthetic cubism to linear classicism, Gorky
sprinted right behind. If Picasso did Ingres, Gorky did Picasso doing
Ingres. As Picasso dodged between abstraction and representation,
Gorky descended into multiple personality disorder, channelling
Picasso, Leger, Kandinsky, Miro and de Chirico all at once.
Gorky was a terrific draughtsman, though, with an imaginative eye and
meticulous technique and, by the 1940s, the multi-mentored disciple
had come into his own as the author of lavish symphonies of line and
colour. "The Liver is the Cock’s Comb", the masterpiece of Gorky’s
maturity, vibrates with warbling crimsons, oranges and golds, its
abstruse codes buried beneath layers of shimmering hues. "The Scent
of Apricots on the Fields" (1944) remakes Cezanne in molten washes
of citrus and mauve. Yet underlining those biomorphic swirls lay the
strokes of Gorky’s vigorous pencil. He overlaid linear, even academic
studies with opulent whorls of paint.
Gorky both invites and repels our efforts to understand his imagery.
Curvaceous and fleshy, intermittently jittery and languorous, it
implies specific meanings that we strain to decipher. But the work’s
power springs precisely from its elusiveness.
Even at his creative peak, Gorky was still looking and learning from
others. By the 1940s, it was the Surrealists, who arrived from Europe
hauling a darker, spikier conception of life’s snares. Gorky’s joyful
canvases began to brim with vampiric symbols of female sexuality
and erotic horror. The Surrealist sensibility chimed with Gorky’s
darkening temper. In January 1946, a studio fire destroyed a trove
of his work. In March, he was diagnosed with cancer and underwent
surgery. In June 1948, a car crash fractured his neck and left his
painting arm temporary useless. Soon afterwards, his wife slept with
his best friend. These events took their toll on his already fragile
psyche. He hanged himself in 1948.
Gorky may have mined and even mimed the discoveries of his
contemporaries, but he had his own singular flair. He could draw
better than almost any of them and he had an unrivalled sense of
colour. This retrospective makes clear that style is merely a form
of language, not its content. And just as Gorky adopted English, the
language of his new home, he also adapted his colleagues’ techniques,
using them to speak with his own inalienable passion.
Until January 10, tel +1 215 763 8100