The Spectator, UK
February 6, 2010
‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’
ARTS
Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective
is about to open at Tate
Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as
beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years.
She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now than when we knew
her as children; we were mesmerised by her chic, her gravelly voice
with its hint of an American accent, her sense of fun and the faint
whiff of excitement that enveloped her. When she was about 17, my
father, then working in China, helped her ashore from a capsized
sailing dinghy and fell in love with her on the spot. She was then
Agnes Magruder, daughter of a captain in the American Navy stationed
off Shanghai, and her youthful romance with my father evolved into a
lifelong friendship.
It was the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky who named her ‘Mougouch’, an
Armenian term of endearment, and she has been Mougouch to all and
sundry ever since.
We talk in her elegant, light-filled drawingroom, she sitting on a
long sofa brightened by colourful throws and cushions, the walls
around her hung with paintings, many by old friends. She slowly rolls
the first of several cigarettes as she tells me about Gorky and the
start of their life together. ‘We were both very innocent and
unsophisticated. When I first visited him in his studio he invited me
to sit with him on the sofa, but just sat there saying nothing. Long
minutes passed in total silence until I summoned all my meagre
experience and said, "I think you’re supposed to entertain me, young
man!" It just hadn’t occurred to him.’ It was not long after that he
asked her to cook him breakfast, and she realised it was ‘the thin end
of the wedge’. They were married within the year, en route home from
San Francisco, where his first solo exhibition was held.
Mougouch was born in 1921 into an old Washington family; she remembers
as a child rolling Easter eggs down the lawn of the White House. By
the age of 19, when she met Gorky in New York, she had travelled
halfway round the world, become a communist and decided to study art.
It was an attraction of opposites: her optimism and confidence
contrasted strongly with Gorky’s propensity to melancholy, the legacy
of his tormented youth in Armenia during the genocide, where he
watched his mother die of starvation in his arms.
He escaped with his younger sister to America in 1920, and by 1941,
when he met Mougouch, he had established himself as a central figure
in American art’s shift towards abstraction.
Having adopted the Russian name Arshile Gorky and forged a new
narrative of his life, he felt a deep ambivalence towards his Armenian
roots. ‘He had once been greeted by an American pastor with the words
"Ah, one of the starving Armenians" and he was keen to distance
himself from that, ‘ Mougouch told me. ‘He was close to his sister
Vartoosh, but never left me alone with her, even for five minutes – he
didn’t want me to hear her stories. And he never admitted that his
father was still alive and working in a foundry in Rhode Island; he’d
told me that he had simply disappeared years before in Armenia.
When I discovered a local Armenian grocer and the owner learnt I was
married to Gorky he was very impressed and told me all about Gorky’s
family, its ancient lineage, its importance in the Armenian Church,
etc.
But Gorky was furious, denied that the man knew anything about him or
his family, and said I must never visit him again. It was not until
years after his death that I discovered his real, Armenian, name and
the truth about his father – it was such a shock.’
Mougouch moved into his studio in Union Square; before long their
daughter Maro was born and, two years later, Natasha. Despite his
growing reputation and the praise of critics like Clement Greenberg,
Gorky sold very few paintings, so money was tight. ‘There we were, all
living on top of one another, Gorky cleaning his brushes in the
kitchen sink, and he wanted to be with me and the children but at the
same time it drove him nuts, ‘ says Mougouch. They had to get out of
the city, and spent long summer months staying on her mother’s farm in
Virginia, where Gorky reconnected with nature and found boundless new
energy to paint.
It was around that time that they first met Andre Breton, the great
Surrealist-inexile. ‘What did you make of him?’ I asked Mougouch. ‘Oh,
I loved him passionately because he so admired Gorky, and did so much
to support him, ‘ she replied. ‘But Breton didn’t speak any English
and Gorky spoke no French, so I had to be interpreter.
In fact, I once heard Breton talking English to a New York taxi-driver
– he had a terrible New York accent – but he didn’t admit to it. He
was a poet, and knew he couldn’t choose his words in English with the
precision that he could in French. We always felt that poets, if they
weren’t visibly stupid, were superior beings.’
I suggested that Gorky felt ambivalent about Surrealism. ‘Well, he
made it his own, and he had steeped himself in its writings – Cahiers
d’art was his Bible when I met him.
My great-aunt, a wise woman and a follower of Jung, used to say that
he was a fisherman who cast his line deep into the well of the
subconscious.’ Along with his close friend, the Chilean-born Roberto
Matta, he explored new expressions of spontaneity and automatism that
reached further and deeper into abstraction than the other
Surrealists.
Then, as if the Fates were pursuing him, a series of tragedies
engulfed Gorky. First his studio caught fire, destroying all its
contents, then he had to undergo an operation for cancer which made
him desperately anxious and depressed. At her wits’ end, Mougouch
turned to Matta. ‘Matta was very important in Gorky’s life, and was
the only person I could confide in – because I knew he loved Gorky and
yet could see my misery for himself.’ Unbeknownst to Mougouch, Gorky
also learnt of his father’s death around this time, and soon after he
was involved in a car crash in which his neck was broken and his
painting arm temporarily paralysed. It was a desperate time and, in
1948, on the advice of their doctor, Mougouch took the children and
fled to safety. A few days later Gorky hanged himself, leaving a note,
‘Goodbye My Loveds’.
‘He was a broken man: if he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live, ‘
reflects Mougouch sadly. But he left a powerful artistic legacy, one
that she and her daughters have overseen with scrupulous care, and one
that Tate’s retrospective now gives us a perfect opportunity to judge
for ourselves.
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern from 10 February to 3 May.