ARSHILE GORKY: A RETROSPECTIVE AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
by Ed Voves
California Literary Review
Nov 9 2009
Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904 – 1948, The Artist and
His Mother, c.1926-36, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 inches Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha
Gorky in memory of their father © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Icon is a word so often used today, that it can be a shock to behold
art that is truly iconic. In the case of Arshile Gorky, the mystical
emotions evoked by actual religious icons are very much present in
his work.
Arshile Gorky, who explored virtually the entire range of modern
art during his tragedy-shaded career, is the subject of a major
retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gorky dedicated
himself to a spiritual quest, as few other artists in the 20th
century sought to do. His aim was nothing less than to recreate the
land of his boyhood, Armenia. The people of that ancient nation had
been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times, victims of
Turkish aggression during the First World War.
"Who now remembers the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler exclaimed, as he and
his Nazi lieutenants planned the Final Solution. The answer can be
found lining the walls of the masterful exhibition in Philadelphia.
Arshile Gorky remembered.
"I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush," Gorky declared in 1944,
"for all the world to see."
Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanik Manook Adoian in 1904. He changed his
name to honor the great Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, who had championed
the cause of the Armenian people when so many others had been content
to ignore their plight. Gorky’s name change also reflected his search
for an identity after the culture of Armenia, along with many members
of his family, had been exterminated by the Turks.
After arriving in the United States in 1920, Gorky embarked upon a
disciplined study of art history and the techniques of the masters of
modern art. Except in his very earliest paintings, Gorky was never a
mere acolyte of other established artists like Paul Cezanne and Joan
Miro. From the first, Gorky was set on finding a new path for himself –
his own.
It was the memory of Armenia and the example of his mother’s devotion
and death by starvation that drove Gorky on. For the greater part of
his working life as an artist, he labored on a number of works devoted
to themes inspired by the experiences of his youth. The chief of these,
and the "show-stopper" of this exhibition, are the two portraits and
related sketches entitled The Artist and His Mother.
The Turkish persecution of the Armenians predated the First World War.
In 1908, Gorky’s father, Setrag Adoian, escaped to the United States
to avoid being conscripted into the Turkish Army. Four years later,
the young Gorky and his mother, Shushaniq, posed for a portrait photo
which was sent to his father. Though strictly conforming to the rigid
conventions of the time, there are emotional undercurrents in this
remarkable photo that Gorky would later explore to the full.
Photograph, Gorky and his mother, Van city, Turkish Armenia, 1912
Courtesy of Dr. Bruce Berberian.
In the photo, the young Gorky’s expression is tinged with shyness,
while his mother faces the camera with more than a hint of doubt,
even reproach, hovering on her features. Gorky’s paintings change the
emotional landscape. In both portraits, he recasts the little boy as
a man of sorrow. More spectacularly, in the somberly painted version
now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, Shushaniq Adoian transfixes
the viewers of this painting with the gaze of an avenging angel.
At first glance, the eyes of Shushaniq Adoian appear to be the gaping
sockets of a skull, mere blackened hollows. Look more closely and
her fully dilated eyes radiate with the energy of hardened orbs of
anthracite coal. Her face is a study in defiance and resolve. The
petulant lips of Gorky’s mother, smeared with a blur of gray and
red leaking down onto her chin, give her the look of a victim of a
brutal police interrogation. But Shushaniq Adoian is the one doing the
questioning in this powerful, searing portrait, asking the viewer why
the plight of the Armenian people has been trivialized into tasteless
remarks like "hungry as a starving Armenian."
Theotokos Hodegetria from the 12th Century
The ultimate source for Gorky’s homage to his martyred mother and his
lost childhood can be traced much further than reworkings of a 19th
century style photograph. Gorky’s chief inspiration for The Artist
and His Mother was one of the most revered forms of art in the Eastern
rites of Christianity, the Theotokos Hodegetria. These icon portraits
of "The Mother of God Who Shows the Way," depict the infant Jesus
being embraced by his mother Mary, whose head is tilted in loving,
wistful solicitude. Her slender curving fingers point to him as the
redeemer of humankind, while the expression of the Christ child in
these icons is usually marked by wisdom or suffering beyond his years.
Both versions of Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother evoke these hallowed
themes, but with crucial differences. In both, it is the young Gorky
whose head is bowed toward his mother. His reverent pose and sorrowing
countenance acknowledge his mother as the martyr, sacrificing her life
that her son might live. Yet there is no embrace, not even a touch in
the Whitney Museum version. Here, the two figures are separated by a
slight, yet unbridgeable gulf. Indeed, this tragic severing of the bond
between mother and son is taken to a truly terrifying degree. Gorky
renders his mother’s hands as unformed, whitened masses. Her hands
look as though they are swathed in bandages, the fingers having been
burned or hacked-off. No physical intimacy is thus possible, nor is
there any future of hope or happiness that she can point to.
The tragedy implicit in the gulf between mother and son in the Whitney
Museum version is underscored by the fact that Gorky’s mother had
actually died in his arms.
The second version of The Artist and His Mother, in the collection
of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is lighter in tone and
closer in spirit to the original photograph. It is hugely significant,
however, that both paintings transform the apron worn by Gorky’s
mother when she posed for the portrait photo. The vividly embroidered
designs on her apron, so evocative of Armenia’s culture and heritage,
are completely erased in the paintings. The apron of Gorky’s mother
has become her shroud.
In Gorky’s memory, the embroidered designs lived on. As his dialogues
with the various schools of modern art resolved into an embrace of
Surrealism, he was finally able to do justice to the designs on his
mother’s apron. In 1944, when he was at the height of his artistic
power and enjoying a brief moment of personal happiness, Gorky painted
How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. Upon finishing
this work, he wrote to his sister Vartoosh that "just a short while
ago I completed a most successful work emanating from the abstract
Armenian shapes of her apron. . . ."
In a 1995 ArtForum article, the British poet and cultural historian,
John Ash, wrote of his visit to Turkish Armenia in which he tried
to trace the roots of Gorky’s abstract art back to his boyhood. Ash
described how Gorky’s mother had taken him as a child to the ancient
monastery of Varak to view its peerless collection of Armenian
manuscript paintings dating to the Middle Ages. About these, Gorky
recalled "their beautiful Armenian faces, subtle colors, their tender
lines and calligraphy."
During their 1915 ethnic-cleansing campaign, the Turks burned these
manuscripts, destroyed the town of Khorkom, later memorialized in
Gorky’s art, and targeted members of his mother’s family for death.
When Ash tried to visit Khorkum in 1994, he was prevented from doing
so, but when he showed his Turkish guide copies of Gorky’s paintings,
the guide responded that "these were the colors of Van in spring
and autumn."
Gorky transformed these talismans of his youth, the embroidered
flowers on his mother’s apron and his memories of the gardens,
fields and groves of trees surrounding Armenia’s Lake Van into the
subject matter for his surrealist masterpieces of the 1940s. In How
My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, the embroidered
flowers are dissolved by memory and Gorky’s distinctive brush strokes
of liquefied, almost translucent color. The surroundings of the garden
where he played as a child are likewise liberated into the willowy,
floating imagery of The Garden in Sochi series.
Gorky explored the themes of his Armenian boyhood as an American
artist. It is one of the great strengths of this retrospective that
we can see how the experience of his childhood informed his later
life and influenced the development of American art. Along with
The Artist and His Mother and other paintings directly related to
the Armenian genocide, the exhibition presents Gorky’s murals for
the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, his
abstract evocations of the rural American landscape during the early
1940’s and his searing depictions of the physical pain and mental
anguish that drove him to suicide in 1948.
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