ARSHILE GORKY - AN INTRODUCTION

ARSHILE GORKY – AN INTRODUCTION

The book Arshile Gorky – The breakthrough years was published in 1995 by Rizzoli International Publications in association with Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. 

The book is described as ‘Organized by Michael Auping’. 

The book includes essays by Matthew Spender (Arshile Gorky’s early life), Dore Ashton (A straggler’s view of Gorky) and Michael Auping (An erotic garden).

This is a summary of the Introduction to the book by Michael Auping.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arshile-Gorky-The-Breakthrough-Years/dp/0914782924

Arshile Gorky – an introduction

Forging a new identity

Some of the most significant art of the twentieth century resulted from artists adapting to a new culture, while retaining powerful memories of their homeland: Picasso, Kandinsky, Beckmann, Mondrian, Leger and de Kooning being prominent examples.  Arshile Gorky is another such artist.  At their deepest level his paintings result from Gorky’s desire to connect memories of his homeland of Armenia with his new home in the USA and to forge a new identity between the two.  But this does not come easily to exiles and refugees, and Gorky’s story is a poignant one.

The artist was born Vosdanik Adoian in 1904 at Khorkom in Armenia.  His parents were Lady Shushanik der Marderosian and Sedrak Adoian.  On his mother’s side he was descended from a family of Armenian Apostolic Church priests; his father’s family were landed gentry.  The Turkish invasions of Armenia interrupted his childhood.  His father left for the USA in search of a new life for the family: the trauma of this separation left the young Vosdanik Adoian speechless until the age of five.  By the age of fifteen he had seen his mother die from starvation during a forced march across Armenia. 

It was Gorky’s mother who most strongly fostered in him the notion of being an artist.  The landscape of Armenia left a strong impression on Gorky, and in particular the garden around his parents’ house. 

Gorky arrived in America in 1920.  He resolved to pursue life as an artist.  He took the name Arshile Gorky, claiming to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.  In legend Arshile was an Armenian Achilles – powerful but flawed. 

Gorky learned modern art in an old fashioned, self-taught way: he visited museums, studying and copying styles and techniques.  In the 1920s his style was an imitation of Impressionism, Cezanne and Synthetic Cubism.  His heroes were Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Matisse and Leger.  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Gorky also painted self-portraits, imaginary companions and his own family – the most noteworthy being the portraits of his mother that he painted between 1926 and 1936.

The desire to create deeper and purer work

The 1930s were important for Gorky’s eventual maturity but they were also a low point in his life.  In 1938 he wrote to his sister Vartoosh describing his melancholy and the way in which he could concentrate on nothing except his work.  He says that his painting style is changing and that he suffers ‘extreme mental anguish’ and that he does not expect to be satisfied about his works.  He says that he ‘desires to create deeper and purer work’.

Auping writes:

‘It was in the 1930s that he applied many layers to his canvases in an effort to locate a sensibility that reflected his increasingly complex psychological state; as well, these images would somehow come to embody and reflect the psychology of his time.  Of course, it was not just Gorky who was anxious and searching. The war in Europe would allow New York to imagine itself as the new centre of the art world.  New York criticism and gossip were abuzz with how art there might radically overthrow that of the School of Paris.  As an artist who understood modernism intuitively, as it were, Gorky was in a position to be a new spearhead of the possibilities’.

Garden in Sochi

The last nine years of Gorky’s life (c1940-1948) were a time of great expansion in American art, and for Gorky himself.  A ‘more spontaneous, expressionist aesthetic’ was taking the place of the styles of the 1920s and 1930s. 

Auping identifies two styles that particularly influenced artists in New York in the 1940s: ’the colour-inspired gesture of Kandinsky’; and European surrealism. 

And New York was becoming a home to European radicals who had been exiled from their homeland.

Auping summarises Surrealism as the belief that ultimate reality could be achieved by unifying two apparently contradictory states – the dream and reality.  Surrealism pushed Gorky to new experimentation.  Auping states that Miro and Kandinsky particularly inspired him to achieve in the early 1940s ‘an intriguingly hybrid image of description, memory, and pure abstraction’. 

Between 1938 and 1942 Gorky worked on paintings that he entitled ‘Garden in Sochi’.  This is the time of Gorky’s breakthrough to his mature imagery: ‘Remembered landscapes from his childhood in Armenia fuse surrealist imagery with abstract bursts of line and colour, anticipating the expressive gestures that are the hallmarks of the movement that would later be called Abstract Expressionism’.

Auping writes that although the paintings refer to Sochi – a resort on the Russian Black Sea coast, Gorky was explicit that his inspiration was his childhood home at Khorkom.  He wrote a letter to his sister in 1943 that he felt an American audience would be ‘more receptive of a Russian home than an Armenian home’.

Crooked Run Farm

In the early 1940s Gorky’s life and work was renewed.  In 1941 he married Agnes Magruder, who gave her husband a new sense of mission.  A survey exhibition of Gorky’s work took place in 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and, whilst this gave Gorky a valuable opportunity to show his work, it probably also stimulated him to further development.

After their marriage, Arshile and Agnes began a series of retreats to Agnes’ parents’ home at Crooked Run Farm in Virginia.  Here Gorky completed many drawings and paintings.  The rural setting enabled Gorky to engage with his memories of Khorkom. 

Auping writes:

‘Nature, and its abilities to catalyse his memories of Armenia, became the central element in inspiring Gorky’s breakthrough years of the 1940s’.

A more fluid medium, Kandinsky and drawing in the open air

Auping identifies three factors that contributed the development of Gorky’s work in the early 1940s.

Gorky met the Chilean Surrealist artist Matta Echaurren who encouraged Gorky to use a more fluid painting medium achieved by the addition of turpentine.  This achieved ‘fluid, spontaneous veils of thin paint (which) operate between keen observation and expressionist fantasy’.

Kandinsky’s early paintings influenced Gorky in the way that they are ‘an emotional response to nature, rather than direct observation’.  Kandinsky’s ‘The Waterfall’ of 1909 may have partially inspired Gorky’s ‘Waterfall’ of 1942-43.  Aupin describes Gorky’s ‘Waterfall’ as ‘one of Gorky’s most brilliant accomplishments in combining emotional spontaneity and direct observation’ and ‘an inspired abstraction in rich greens and blues’. 

The drawings made by Gorky in Virginia are described by Aupin as having been a transforming influence on Gorky.  Aupin emphasises that Gorky valued drawing as ‘the scaffolding for all his imagery’.  Gorky wrote: ‘Drawing is the basis of art.  A bad painter cannot draw.  But a good drawer can always paint’.  In the 1930s Gorky’s ‘precise line’ had enabled him to produce ‘intimate and elegantly outlined portraits’; in the 1940s his drawing skills enabled Gorky to investigate ‘ambiguous plant and insect forms’ at Crooked Run Farm as he sketched in the open air.   The landscape was the setting in which Gorky could reconcile the different parts of his inner world. 

The exhibition in the Spring of 1945

In 1944 Gorky met Andre Breton – poet and champion of surrealism – and Breton persuaded the gallery owner Julien Levy to represent Gorky’s work.  Levy held an exhibition of Gorky’s work in Spring 1945 and this was probably the most significant show of Gorky’s work during his lifetime.  This established Gorky’s presence in the developing school of Abstract Expressionism. 

Breton wrote an introduction to Gorky’s work in which he acclaims Gorky as ‘the first painter to whom the secret has been revealed’: Gorky’s works are not of any established genre of painting because they are ‘hybrid forms in which all human emotion is precipitated’. 

Later works

Gorky continued to work with memories of his homeland.  In 1946 and 1947 the titles of Gorky’s works indicate melancholy, and Gorky’s physical circumstances became tragic.  In 1945 a fire in his studio destroyed many of his works.  In the same year he underwent an operation for cancer. 

The last one-person show of Gorky’s lifetime took place in February 1948.  Of the show, the critic Clement Greenburg wrote: ‘Gorky at last ... takes his place ... among the very few contemporary American painters whose work is of more than national importance’. 

Later in 1948 Gorky and Levy were in a road traffic accident leading Gorky’s back being broken and his painting arm being paralysed.  Gorky and Agnes separated soon afterwards with Agnes taking the children with her. 

On 21^st July 1948 Arshile Gorky took his own life at the age of forty four.

Gorky’s legacy to Abstract Expressionism

Auping concludes by saying that conventional wisdom places Gorky between Surrealism of the 1930s and Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.  He states that Gorky’s work resists classification. 

Soon after Gorky’s death Willem de Kooning wrote a letter to Art News extolling the value of Gorky’s work and claiming Gorky as an original inspiration for his own work. 

Auping writes: ‘Gorky ultimately inspired many more (than de Kooning), laying the aesthetic groundwork for the greatest revolution in American painting’. 

He concludes by printing a photograph from Life magazine dating from the 1950s of ‘The Irascibles’ – the key figures of Abstract Expressionism – to whom he states that Gorky left ‘an eloquent legacy of images’.  The artists in the photograph are: de Kooning; Gottlieb; Reinhardt; Sterne; Pousette-Dart; Baziotes; Pollock; Still; Motherwell; Tomlin; Stamos; Jimmy Ernst; Newman; Brooks; and Rothko.