Arshile Gorky
Gorky’s life ended very badly, with an appalling concatenation of misfortunes. A studio fire destroyed a large number of his paintings. He was diagnosed with cancer. He was involved in a car crash that left him with a broken neck and severely compromised his ability to paint. He became an alcoholic. As if that were not enough, his wife then left him. In July 1948, he hanged himself. But it was partly because his last years were so tragic that Gorky became such a hero to the generation of American painters to come after him. He was, in a sense, their Van Gogh. From his ashes, the phoenix of Abstract Expressionism would rise.
Date: 03-02-2010
Owning Institution: Tate
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011
Subject:
20th Century
In the years after the Second World War a new form of American modern art was born. Bold and monumental, resolutely non-figurative, Abstract Expressionism seemed perfectly to express the post-war American spirit – forward-looking, risk-taking, audacious. But what is sometimes forgotten is just how suddenly and from what apparently unpromising soil Abstract Expressionism sprung into being. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, American modern art lagged far behind that of Europe. While European art was being transformed in the many crucibles of modernist experiment, most Americans – and many American artists – remained largely unaware of the work of artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso.
So where did the Abstract Expressionists’ brave new spirit come from? Tate Modern’s forthcoming show, “Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia”, sets out to answer the question. Having already been seen over the winter at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition is devoted to the work of one of the unsung heroes of American modern art. An Armenian emigre, Gorky acted as a kind of transatlantic pipeline for new ideas and approaches to painting.
So where did the Abstract Expressionists’ brave new spirit come from? Tate Modern’s forthcoming show, “Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia”, sets out to answer the question. Having already been seen over the winter at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition is devoted to the work of one of the unsung heroes of American modern art. An Armenian emigre, Gorky acted as a kind of transatlantic pipeline for new ideas and approaches to painting.
Gorky passionately believed that the successive revolutions to have swept through modern art during the first three decades of the twentieth century, principally in Paris but also in Berlin, amounted to nothing less than a second Renaissance. He set out to spread the word about it in America, and did so in a remarkably programmatic way. From the mid-1920s on, deliberately suppressing his own creative personality, he created a whole series of extraordinarily faithful homages to the major artists of the modern movement in Europe. His subjects were American, but that was all. He made Newark (of all places) look like Cezanne’s Aix-en-Provence. He turned American dancers into Picasso figures with distorted anatomies and made American workers look like Fernand Leger’s mechanomorphs.
Gorky’s early work is bizarre and impressive in equal measure. It is utterly derivative, yet done with total conviction and all the skill of a master forger. At first and even second glance, Gorky’s Cezannes and Picassos, his Braques and his Legers, could actually be taken for the real things. Standing in a room full of these paintings, it is hard to believe that they were all painted by the same man. To call them homages misses a part of what makes them so unusual. They are so like the work to have inspired them as to amount to a form of artistic ventriloquism. Gorky argued that it would be presumptuous for any painter working in the aftermath of the great European modern artists to attempt to formulate his own, original style until he had fully mastered their innovations. He was, in effect, living out his apprenticeship in public.
During the thirties, other American artists gradually began to look to Gorky as a kind of enigmatic art guru. He was a charismatic figure, darkly good-looking, with a droopy moustache possibly cultivated in distant emulation of Salvador Dali. He was also a little bit of a Walter Mitty character. Although his actual experience of modern European art was derived mostly from art magazines, he made up the story that he had worked as a studio assistant to Kandinsky and even claimed distant kinship with the Russian author, Maxim Gorky. In reality, his past was dark and troubled. He had escaped Armenia in 1920, when he was still just a teenager, leaving behind him the aftermath of genocide. Over a million men, women and children had been shot, butchered or starved to death by the Turkish army. Gorky’s own mother had died in his arms.
His embrace of the modern, the new and the revolutionary may partly have stemmed from a need or desire to forget his own past. But forget it he never quite did. All through the years of his self-imposed apprenticeship to the modern masters, he worked away obsessively at two haunting portraits of himself as a young boy together with his lost and lamented mother. Each work is painted in a style that echoes but no longer pastiches the portraiture of Picasso and Matisse, while also distantly evoking the folk art of Armenia. The figures stare out with glassy eyes, accusatory ghosts from an atrocious past.
During the late 1930s and 1940s, the slow-developing Gorky finally blossomed into a brief but prolific maturity. He developed his own language of art, painting vibrant abstracts inspired, among other things, by happier memories of the Armenian landscape he had left behind as a child. But there is also a darker edge to many of these later paintings, in which blooming flowers often also come to resemble spilled blood and slashing brushstrokes seem almost cut into the surface of the canvas like wounds. They strikingly prefigure the work, in particular, of Weillem de Kooning.
Gorky’s life ended very badly, with an appalling concatenation of misfortunes. A studio fire destroyed a large number of his paintings. He was diagnosed with cancer. He was involved in a car crash that left him with a broken neck and severely compromised his ability to paint. He became an alcoholic. As if that were not enough, his wife then left him. In July 1948, he hanged himself. But it was partly because his last years were so tragic that Gorky became such a hero to the generation of American painters to come after him. He was, in a sense, their Van Gogh. From his ashes, the phoenix of Abstract Expressionism would rise.
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