TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN; AN ARSHILE GORKY RETROSPECTIVE.
Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker
November 2, 2009
The safest and loneliest place in the world, for a devotee of
modern art, is within arm’s length of any first-rate painting by
Arshile Gorky, the subject of a galvanically moving retrospective
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In that zone, where the artist’s
decisions register kinesthetically, awakening your sense of touch as
well as enchanting your eye, it is hard to doubt the value of the
modernist adventure: a bet on the adequacy of sheer form, in the
right hands, to compensate for a lost faith in established orders
of civilization. No other artist has invested more ardor in naked
technique: how to activate an edge, how to rhyme a color. Gorky was an
academic painter in a modern academy of one. Take "Scent of Apricots
on the Fields" (1944). A pileup of loosely outlined, thinly painted
fragmentary shapes, like plant or body parts, embedded in passages of
golden yellow, hovers above a green suggestion of a table and below
a skylike expanse of brushy rose red.
Dabs of raw turpentine cause runny dissolutions, as if some forms
were melting into their white ground. The downward drips yield a
paradoxical sensation of buoyancy. The picture’s visceral shapes
seem to ascend like putti in a Renaissance firmament. The dynamics
are at once obvious and inspired, stroke by stroke and hue by hue,
and deliriously affecting-when viewed near at hand.
>From a distance, the work flummoxes evaluation. Its style fits only
too comfortably into a period vogue of surrealistic abstraction-that
of minor figures like André Masson and Roberto Matta, backed by
the giants Picasso, Kandinsky, and Miró. Its content-romanticizing
supposed memories of a boyhood that Gorky regularly lied about-is
"poetic" in ways that turn treacly and banal when you try to appreciate
them. Art history and biography are blind alleys in Gorky’s case. His
art feels contemporary, because no discursive account of the past
can contain it. That also makes it a lonely enthusiasm, difficult
to espouse. Still, he is the twentieth-century painter dearest to
my heart.
Of what use is biography in assessing someone who made himself up?
Gorky told people, including his wife, that he was Russian, a cousin
of the writer Maxim Gorky (evidently unaware that "Maxim Gorky"
was a pen name), born in the Caucasus in 1905 and educated in France.
Actually, he was an Ottoman Armenian, Vosdanig Adoian, born circa
1902, in a village near Van. He couldn’t speak Russian and never saw
France. His father emigrated to America in 1908. His mother died
in Yerevan, perhaps of starvation, in 1919, four years after the
remaining family had fled the Turkish massacres of Armenians. In 1920,
Adoian and a sister joined relatives in Watertown, Massachusetts. The
first evidence of his new identity appears as the signature "Gorky,
Arshele," on "Park Street Church, Boston," a skillful pastiche of
Neo-Impressionism that he painted in 1924, while teaching at an art
school in Boston. He admired the work of John Singer Sargent before
latching onto Cézanne, as a god of art second only, later, to Picasso.
Early imitations of Cézanne, in the show, are astonishingly acute.
Cézanne is the foremost of painters who unfold their majesty to
close-up inspection. (Gorky stumbled in his tyro emulations of Matisse
and De Chirico, artists more reliant on over-all design.) With Gorky,
influence is no incidental issue. I think he never ceased to regard
his own creations vicariously, through the conjured eyes of heroes-he
cited Uccello, Grunewald, Ingres, Seurat. He spoke with scorn of
"originality" as a criterion of artistic value. His friend and
self-declared disciple Willem de Kooning reported Gorky’s remarking
to him, "Aha, so you have ideas of your own." De Kooning recalled,
"Somehow, that didn’t seem so good."
The tall, preposterously handsome Gorky, who moved to New York in
1924 and took a studio on Union Square in 1930, was revered for his
gifts, enjoyed for his clowning, and resented for his bossiness in
the poverty-ravaged downtown art scene. Many women adored him. I
incline to a partly cynical view of his famous images of himself as
a painfully shy lad with his haunted-looking mother, based on a 1912
photograph. Gorky’s suffering was surely real, but the pathos of the
pictures strikes me as calculated to seduce. He wanted mothering. In
politics, he was a loose cannon among radicals, an admirer of Stalin
who pronounced social realism "poor art for poor people." In 1936,
he produced W.P.A. murals, later mostly destroyed, for Newark Airport.
(Photographs show him explaining the work to a visibly unimpressed
Fiorello La Guardia.) Remnants of the murals, in the Philadelphia
show, deploy a dashing, generic modern-artiness like that of his
friend Stuart Davis. But Gorky’s ambition centered on an intimate and
desperate grappling with Picasso, whom he didn’t so much emulate as
channel, in a spirit nicely characterized by the critic Robert Storr
in the show’s catalogue: that of "a gifted pianist who habitually
forgets in the middle of performing a canonical sonata that he has
not composed it himself."
Gorky’s Picassoesque works of the thirties are commonly scanted in
favor of the pictures with which, from about 1940 until his suicide,
in 1948, he anticipated the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism. (His
end was terrible, in a madness brought on by a studio fire that
destroyed much of his recent work, an operation for rectal cancer,
his beloved wife’s affair with his best friend, and a crippling
car crash.) But the drama of, say, "Enigmatic Combat" (1936-37),
a sprightly patchwork of amoeboid and spiky shapes, rivets me. Its
thickly layered surface bespeaks long, onerous toil for a kind of
effect that Picasso brought off with ease. The task seems absurd.
Gorky’s self-abnegating success with it has the equivocal glory of
a saint’s welcomed martyrdom.
The Philadelphia show, curated by Michael R. Taylor, is probably
overcrowded and definitely underlit (a consequence of interspersing
paintings with drawings, which, in standard museum practice, require
dim illumination). And it’s wacky, in the big section representing
the early forties, when Gorky abandoned his downtown friends for
the relatively glittering society of refugees-including Léger and
Duchamp-who embraced him. Walls painted with a wraparound, jagged band
of gray, evoking exhibition styles that were a la mode at that time,
emphasize a revisionist thesis that Taylor spells out in a catalogue
essay-assigning Gorky’s breakthrough works to European Surrealism
rather than American abstraction. I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. Gorky
is ours. The exiles inspired him; André Breton celebrated him as
"the only painter in America"; Matta taught him a crucial trick of
divorcing crisp line from atmospheric washes of color. But the younger
Surrealists, like Matta, were mediocrities on the down slope of a
movement. De Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and other locals grasped and
developed the revolutionary implications of what Gorky did, which was,
roughly, to scale every inch of a painting to the impact of the whole.
American eyes saw through the lingering Surrealist clichés in his
work-often sketchily abstracted sex organs-to a new, expansive,
burstingly songful type of pictorial unity.
Textures of intensely sensitive touch, making forms quiver and squirm,
are the most eloquent element in late Gorky. Color comes second, yet
it, too, is extraordinary, evoking bodily wounds and inflammations
and ungraspable subtleties of nature. Drawing, though busily abundant,
feels incidental, like fleeting thoughts of a mind in the grip of an
extreme emotion. I am convinced that, had Gorky lived, he would have
suppressed line, perhaps in a way that, absent him, fell to Rothko. He
would also undoubtedly have undertaken bigger canvases, in the budding
New York School manner. "Untitled" (1943-48), a medium-sized and not
quite resolved painting, of scrappy shapes jittering in a surface of
hot orange scumbled over a muted yellow, feels pregnant with promises
of engulfing wonderment. The closing chords of Gorky’s unfinished
symphony remain incipient.