The Times (London)
July 26, 2013 Friday
Edition 1; National Edition
Mougouch Fielding; Bohemian muse and widow of the painter Arshile
Gorky, whose work she championed after his suicide
As Arshile Gorky’s wife and muse, and for six decades his widow,
Mougouch Magruder Gorky Phillips Fielding nurtured the work and
burnished the reputation of the father of Abstract Expressionism and
the man Robert Hughes described as “a kind of Bridge of Sighs between
Surrealism and America”.
A bright, bold, patrician beauty, she had a genius for friendship,
drawing devotees from New York’s postwar Surrealists to the last
members of the Bloomsbury Group. The travel writers Patrick Leigh
Fermor, Robin Fedden and Bruce Chatwin were among her admirers. When
her daughter Antonia married Martin Amis, his friend Christopher
Hitchens summed up her provenance as “pure bohemian aristocracy”.
Agnes Magruder was the daughter of the East Coast establishment –
Washingtonian John Holmes Magruder II, a US naval attaché (later
Commodore), and his Bostonian wife, Ester Hosmer. She attended schools
in Washington, The Hague and Switzerland. Aged 19, she went to
Manhattan, where she enrolled at the Art Students League before
quitting for a typing Job at a communist magazine.
In February 1941 she was introduced to Gorky by her friends Elaine and
Willem de Kooning. Tall and good-looking with an extravagant
moustache, Gorky presented himself as a Georgian prince, a nephew of
Maxim Gorky, an alumnus of Brown and a student of Kandinsky. Although
she would not know it until a decade after his death, he was, in fact,
Vosdanig Manoug Adoian, an Armenian refugee who had survived the
Turkish genocide and landed on Ellis Island in 1920. When Agnes met
him, he was eking out a living by teaching at the Grand Central School
and selling the odd painting. His work was heavily derivative,
brilliantly imitating Cézanne almost stroke for stroke, and so closely
following Picasso that he would exclaim, “If he drips, I drip”. He
called Agnes “Mougouch” – little mighty one – a name which stuck. She
would say, “When I think of Gorky, I think about my life beginning.”
They married, to her parents’ horror, in September 1941 in Nevada
before a JP, with a curtain ring from Woolworths. Mougouch moved into
his Union Square studio where they lived on 64 cents a day. With his
captivating wife by his side, Gorky’s circle expanded.
Mougouch charmed dealers and cooked deliciously for curators. The most
dramatic effect on his work was three summers spent at the Magruder
estate in Virginia. At Crooked Run Farm, with his wife and their
daughters, Maro and later Natasha, his happiness spilt into his work.
Somehow reconnecting with the country of his childhood, his pictures,
like Water of the Flowery Mill and One Year the Milkweed, came alive
in mesmeric forms, not unlike Miró but entirely his own. “Dreams form
the bristles of the artist’s brush” was how he put it. A New York
Times critic described his abstract landscapes from this time as
“bathed in autumnal Keatsian mist, their forms as pulpy and sweet as
peeled ripe fruit”.
But in 1946 their life began to unravel. A fire in Gorky’s studio
destroyed 27 paintings, some portraits of Mougouch among them, and a
lifetime of drawings and art books. Two months later he was diagnosed
with rectal cancer and had a colostomy. A burst of painting followed,
including the elegiac Charred Beloved, but he was, in turn, angry and
depressed. A desperate, bewildered Mougouch had a brief affair with
Gorky’s friend, Edward Matta Echaurren – a serial seducer. As she
recalled, “[I] ruined my life with one zip”. Soon after, Gorky broke
his neck in a car accident and his painting arm was temporarily
paralysed. Mougouch returned to a demented Gorky. When he began
hanging ropes in the garden she told their daughters he was making
swings for them. After he pushed her down the stairs, his doctor
advised she take the children away and they fled to Virginia. Days
later, on July 21, 1948, Gorky hanged himself, leaving in chalk on the
box he had stood on and kicked away, “Goodbye my loveds”.
After a decade married to another painter, the Bostonian John (Jack)
C. Phillips, with whom she had two daughters, Mougouch moved to
London. In 1961 she Joined the circle (and thus the diaries) of
Frances Partridge, the last of the Bloomsburys, and David (“Bunny”)
Garnett. In 1979 she married the writer and Crete war hero Xan
Fielding.
All through her life she kept the flame of Gorky alive, lending his
pictures for retrospectives and showing remarkable generosity and
honesty with biographers. Among the results were superb books by her
son-in-law, Matthew Spender, and her stepdaughter, Hayden Herrera. In
2011 she appeared with Maro and Natasha in an extraordinary film
directed by her granddaughter, Cosima Spender. Together they visited
Union Square and the places of Gorky’s birth and death. As she rolled
her own cigarettes, 90-year-old Mougouch, still strikingly handsome,
recalled in her low rich voice her life with Gorky. “He was so proud,
and high and fine-looking. And he had a mighty paintbrush. I was
smitten immediately.”
She is survived by four daughters.
Mougouch Fielding, widow of Arshile Gorky, was born on June 1, 1921.
She died on June 2, 2013, aged 92