Date: 06-02-1990
Owning Institution: Whitechapel Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999        
Subject:   20th Century      

Andrew Graham-Dixon on a retrospective exhibition of Arshile Gorky's paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery

WE LIVE, it is often said, in a period of aesthetic reappraisal, a time when it has become fashionable to rediscover lost geniuses and resurrect schools of painting long consigned by museum curators to the store room. It is less often noted that the forces behind such reassessments are at least as conservative as they are radical: the effect is invariably to promote, rather than demote, the artist or artists involved. The art mar-ket, hungry for new commodities, doubtless plays its part. (MORE)

''Arshile Gorky'', at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, is an unusual exhibition. It suggests that Gorky, long considered a pivotal figure in the development of American art, variously acclaimed as the last of the Surre-alists and the first of the Abstract Expressionists, was perhaps less significant a figure than he has been cracked up to be. This show - although those responsible for it would probably disagree - raises the awkward possibility that Gorky just may have been an average painter, a petit maitre who has been remembered as a genius for reasons of art historical convenience.

Gorky's was a career based on imposture and impersonation. Arriving in America in 1920 as an Arme-nian refugee, Vosdanik Adoian changed his name to Arshile Gorky and passed himself off as a Russian. This was, perhaps, an understandable strategy for an immigrant artist with ambitions for self-betterment. Most Americans, after all, knew where Russia was, and that it was the sort of place you might expect an arty type to come from - but Armenia? Forget it. The self-invention, however, didn't end there. By 1926, a journal-ist for the New York Evening Post could write, of this ''23-year-old Russian painter'', that ''he is a cousin of the famous writer, Maxim Gorky.''

The Artist and His Mother, hung prominently in the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Gorky retrospective, is al-most the only painting in which this curious and enigmatic artist chose to address his Armenian past with anything like directness. It seems unfinished, patchy; the faces are what count. Both are glassy-eyed. He stares out with an expression that seems to mingle adolescent disquiet with a solemn determination to play the adult. She is distant, her face set, a mask of grief. She is as pale as a ghost.

The painting is both wistful and valedictory, an exile's testament to lost family, lost youth and lost homeland. ''For good or bad,'' wrote Gorky in later life, ''I believe that I have experienced more than my fellow artists.'' That was an understatement. Born in Khorkom, a small village in what is now eastern Turkey, Gorky had, by the time he was 15, seen his family torn apart and his home sacked by Turkish soldiers. In Van City in 1919, in a province blockaded by the Turks, Gorky's mother died of starvation in his arms.

Becoming Arshile Gorky, Vosdanik Adoian buried his past. The will to impersonation carried through to his work. Gorky started out by trying to be Cezanne, as his early Landscape, the first work you encounter at the Whitechapel, attests. It's a fairly convincing performance: the giveaway, perhaps, is the uniformly dull colour, which suggests perhaps that Gorky's Cezanne- esque style was the product of looking at reproduc-tions, not paintings.

There is something both obsessive and programmatic about Gorky's pastiches of high modernism. From Cezanne he proceeded to Matisse (the hothouse luxuriance of Still Life with Flowers, 1928) and from there graduated to something very like the mature style of Braque (Composition with Vegetables, 1928). It seems to have been at around this time that he succumbed, with what in his case looks like virtually art-historical necessity, to the influence of Picasso.

And there, for some time, he remained stuck. Gorky painted in the manner of Picasso's Synthetic Cub-ism (the overlay of quasi-abstract forms you find in Abstraction with Palette), or in the dislocated figurative idiom Picasso favoured in the 1930s (Composition with Head) - but he did so, almost invariably, with slavish fidelity to his sources. Where contemporaries like Stuart Davis attempted to Americanise Cubism by intro-ducing elements of local colour - substituting, say, banjos for Picasso's and Braque's ubiquitous guitars - Gorky disdained such tactics, aiming at perfect simulation. For all that, the paintings feel blocked, obstructed, clotted by Gorky's fondness for heavy textures.

The Whitechapel show is a little dishonest about this aspect of Gorky, hanging only a few selective samples from each phase of borrowed inspiration. It gives equal weight to the type of provincial, folksy portraiture - of which The Artist and His Mother is the outstanding example - that he executed, almost on the quiet and in far smaller quantities, while so resolutely playing the part of the up-to-the-minute modernist. This serves to bolster what has become a powerful and seemingly unshakeable orthodoxy concerning Gorky - the notion that, in the early 1940s, he suddenly ''found'' himself, and that he did so by returning to the Armenian origins he had spent his life thus far blocking out with exercises in academic modernism.

This is an extremely attractive scenario, and it is one that the Whitechapel does its level best to support. The show divides neatly into two halves. Downstairs, Gorky the copyist and Gorky the suppressed Armenian - upstairs, emerging miraculously from the chrysalis of his former self, he becomes Gorky the major art-historical landmark, the painter who predicts New York's displacement of Paris as the world capital of modern art. And he does so, paradoxically, by finding a way to address his Armenian past - or so, once again, it has always been maintained.

The key that is said to have unlocked Gorky's genius is, characteristically, another influence. This time, it's Miro, whose world of vigorous, wriggling biomorphs undeniably lies behind so much of what Gorky would create in the few years left to him after 1940.

Gorky maintained that the paintings of his later years, on which his considerable reputation entirely de-pends, were depictions of somewhere he called ''The Garden of Wish-Fulfilment'', a place he used to roam with his mother near the village where he was raised. It's a landscape swarming with organic possibilities, exuding a kind of opulent but non- specific sexuality. The seedpod bursts, while what could be breast or buttock swells suggestively in an indeterminate, sappy haze; patches of colour whirl on a field of sunburst yellow.

The fact that the late work is abstract has always suited the more imaginatively inclined of his commen-tators, providing them with carte blanche to read into the pictures more or less what they like: to spot the whirling dervish in a linear squiggle or the long grasses of a Khorkom orchard in a field of cursive gestures. But memories of Miro would seem to have played more of a part in these paintings than memories of Arme-nia, whatever the artist himself said about them. Gorky's later work is less derivative than what had come before, but not, in the end, that much less.

The main question raised by this show is, perhaps, a political one: why has the art establishment, and the American art establishment in particular, been so extraordinarily keen to promote the idea of Gorky as a great, pioneering figure in modern art? The answer to that, maybe, is that it is so art-historically convenient to do so.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the pattern of Gorky's derivations should mirror so closely what New York's Museum of Modern Art has always argued is the inevitable evolution of modern art: from Cezanne to Cubism, from there to the later art of Picasso and on to Surrealism and Miro, prelude to the great achieve-ments of American Abstract Expressionism. Gorky has been cast as the link man between Paris and New York, the artist whose work provides - in the words of Harold Rosenberg, the first American critic to formulate the stock idea of Gorky - ''a visual metaphor of the digestion of European painting on this side of the Atlantic and its conversion into a new substance.'' The Whitechapel's retrospective suggests that Gorky never did, in fact, fully ''digest'' European art, and that he died too young to convert it into anything truly original.

Resistance to this kind of downward reassessment has been strengthened by the tragic circumstances of Gorky's death. He contracted cancer; a fire in his studio destroyed much of what he considered to be his best work; he was involved in a car crash that left him with a broken neck and a paralysed painting arm; his wife left him. In 1948, he committed suicide. Yet again, the temptations of the scenario are strong: Gorky as the archetypal star-crossed genius, his sad end echoing those of earlier European masters (notably Van Gogh) and predicting those of his American successors (notably Rothko). But a painter has to be judged by his work. Gorky was, in the end, an interesting artist who might, given time, have developed into something more than that. But he was not a major figure.