Arshile Gorky’s meander as a modern master
Although the artist ripped off Cézanne and Picasso, he pioneered
abstract expressionism with his luscious blob work
(Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Washington, Arshile Gorky Estate)
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The Sunday Times/UK
February 14, 2010
Waldemar Januszczak
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When I was a child, I was a sad little sod. Growing up in a Polish
resettlement camp near Swindon, living in a Nissen hut surrounded by
people who washed their dogs in the communal bath, nothing much gave
me pleasure. Except Arshile Gorky.
Chance brought him into my life. My mother would sometimes bring me
back a magazine called Knowledge from the cleaning jobs she was doing,
and this magazine always had in it a full-page reproduction of a
painting. Once, it was El Greco’s Saint Martin and the Beggar. Another
time, Van Gogh’s view of the night cafe at Arles. I cut them out and
treasured them, and, later on, when we moved to Reading, I stuck them
on the wall and stared at them for hours. The one I stared at the
longest, because understanding it was an endless experience, was The
Betrothal II, by Arshile Gorky.
This gorgeous yellow painting, with its cascades of falling shapes,
felt as if it was moving: trickling from top to bottom like the sand
in an hourglass. So much was going on in it. Some of the busy coloured
shapes were outlined in thin black lines, like the ones cartoonists
use. And these cartoonish outlines gave the picture a Disneyish air,
which took the sting out of its difficulty and made it easy for a
child to love. I was six or seven, and knew nothing yet about abstract
expressionism. But I learnt the picture’s title, remembered its
maker’s name and am now delighted to see The Betrothal II lording it
over the best room in Tate Modern’s compelling Gorky show.
Gorky, too, was a refugee. He was born Vosdanig Adoian in Turkish
Armenia in about 1902. When the Turks sided with the Germans in the
first world war and set about eradicating their Armenian population –
the 20th century’s first recorded act of genocide – Vosdanig fled to
Russia, where his mother died of starvation. Somehow, he made his way
to America, where his father had already decamped. And by the late
1920s, he had turned himself into an artist and was calling himself
Arshile Gorky.
We encounter him here as a flagrant copyist, working in the manner of
Cézanne. So outrageously Cézannish is his still life of apples and
pears around a jug, the modern world would surely deem him guilty of
copyright infringement. Even at his most Provençal, though, Gorky
brings some Armenian blackness to his task. At the back of his early
paintings, there is invariably a darkness, gathering like thunder on
the horizon. In 1927, he painted a simple chair in a corner with a
cloth draped over it. Then dramatically murdered its Cézannish air by
placing a skull in the centre.
The show spends a long time watching him find himself. The first five
galleries are thick with borrowings. From Cézanne, he moved on to
Picasso, whose assorted cubistic styles he mimics with endearing
clumsiness. What Picasso achieved in moments with a few quick swishes
of his brush, Gorky takes hours and days and months over, reworking
layer upon layer, until he arrives at pictures as thick as roof
insulation. It’s as if a plasterer has taken up painting. Also
borrowed from Picasso, I suggest, is an insouciance about skipping
from abstraction to figuration. Later in art history, when the divides
hardened, artists would come to blows over such matters. Here, having
watched Gorky struggle to paint his clunky cubistic abstracts, we
suddenly find him standing next to his mother in an entirely
figurative room filled with memories.
There are two versions of The Artist and His Mother. Both took a
decade or more to paint, between 1926 and 1942. Both were based on the
same childhood photograph. The artist, as a boy of 9 or 10, stands
next to his mother, who is seated sternly like an enthroned Madonna in
a romanesque carving, her lovely face framed with a headscarf that
seems to emphasise her saint – liness. Once again, you can smell Picasso
in the room – in the beautiful rose colours of one of the versions and
the sculptural primitivism of the other – but the voice we are
listening to is, at last, the real Gorky’s.
It was in the early 1940s that he finally found himself. Which was
unusual. Indeed, among the giants of 20th-century art, it was unique.
In Europe, the war was absorbing the energy of an entire artistic
generation, and it wasn’t the time for personal growth. Yet for Gorky,
exiled in America, the war seemed to reconnect him with his lost past.
The first painting here that is unmistakably a Gorky, unmistakably
beautiful and unmistakably a masterpiece, is also the first that
refers directly to his Armenian origins. Painted in 1940-42 and called
After Khorkom, this brightly coloured choir of blobs is scattered
vividly with poppy reds and buttercup yellows. Khorkom was the village
in which Gorky was born. The 1940s was when it all happened for him.
He met his second wife, and, since he was 39 and she was 19, we can
surely imagine some of the reasons for the new spring in his step. The
wife had family in Virginia, and for the first time Gorky found
himself driving across the changing landscape of America, enjoying its
tangled rhythms and allowing them to throb in him.
In art, meanwhile, having absorbed a fully imaginary Cézanne and
Picasso, he found himself coming into real-life contact with exiled
surrealists from Europe, and his allegiances switched. It happened
overnight. One moment he was working laboriously with thick
encrustations of paint, the next he was skimming his canvases with
coloured washes and skipping round them with quick black outlines. The
zippy cartoon line work does not come from Disney after all. It comes
from Miro. The rooms ahead are filled, gloriously, with masterclasses
in pioneering abstract expressionism. Every picture is an event, as
busy clusters of blobs – some reminiscent of human dangly bits, others
of tangled forms from the American landscape – shove, slide and
trampoline across throbbing expanses of foggy colour. Something about
the relationship of these blobs to their backgrounds reminded me of
the relationship between cactuses and deserts; or plants and their
beds. But, since we are watching the influence of surrealism here, we
need to suspect psychological origins as well for the luscious blob
work: in dreams, thoughts, remembrances.
As Gorky’s art blossomed, so his life, alas, began curling up and
dying. In 1946, a fire in his studio destroyed 20 paintings. He got
cancer. His marriage broke up. His neck was broken in a car crash and
he found he could no longer paint. Eventually, after trying to hang
himself from various trees, he successfully committed suicide in 1948.
A life that had meandered its way to success so slowly plummeted to
its conclusion like a falling piano. As for The Betrothal II, it is
even more beautiful in the flesh than the beautiful memory I have of
it.
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern, SE1, until May 3