Public Works Art Project

Very little of Gorky’s work on the murals for Newark Airport has survived. The analytic composition was based on the mechanical shapes of airplanes and derived stylistically from Picasso, Léger and Ozenfant. Gorky dissected the mechanics of the airplane into their constituent parts. It is significant that this strategy already represented a conjoining of a Cubist aesthetic with the beginnings of a Surrealist agenda in that he took a well-known object out of its normal context in order to defamiliarise it – in Gorky’s own words “making from the common -  the uncommon.” While this project, with its machine age aesthetic, was not that characteristic of Gorky’s oeuvre, he nevertheless continued to explore the potential of this type of hard edged, flat coloured painting in a large canvas Organization (1935) that was based on two of Picasso’s paintings The Studio (1927-8) and Painter and his Model (1919). Basically a still-life contained within a horizontal and vertical armature of strong black lines it is assembled against a white background which Gorky reworked with many layers of paint. He was famed, despite his poverty, for his profligacy with expensive oil paints. Organization gave rise to a series of still-lifes in which the biomorphism characteristic of Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia reappeared presaging a return to the more poeticised organically charged paintings of his Khorkom theme and his series of Garden in Sochi, both of which were based on his childhood in Khorkom the village of his birth.

It is no secret that Gorky was inventive about a childhood that must have been distressing to say the least and yet was often remembered as beatific. He probably invented much of this happy childhood since in reality conditions were primitive and poverty, even in the good times, all too habitual. But in conversation he remembered the devotion to the land, the gathering of the apricots in his father’s orchard and the tilling of the fields with a plough fashioned out of a tree branch. His fondness for these rituals came out in his art together with a magic that invested his landscapes with a spirit of animism that can be traced back to his love of Coptic and traditional Armenian folk arts. A new period began after Organization; his style became far looser, his use of paint more impulsive and his modulated colours were earthy and warm. These paintings conveyed vestiges of figuration but the shapes were indecipherable or ambiguous, often suggestive of birds, female figures and something that could be a butter churn or boot that would reappear in later works. Basically it was as if shapes that were still contained in Organization’s cloisonnist structure had been released into a more spatial area of play but one in which no one identifiable image could take centre stage. These paintings, and the series of Sochi that followed, seemed to have a hidden narrative that linked in with Gorky’s childhood but also coincided with a period of much happiness when he began living with Agnes Magruder who was to become his wife and mother of his two daughters. From Hans Hoffman, the émigré artist who did most to advance the cause of abstraction in the States, Gorky had learnt about negative and positive space and the need to keep the picture plane flat while at the same time creating a sense of balance by setting up a state of tension between shapes. The problem facing the American artist was that of bringing abstract form and meaning together. For artists such as Rothko and Pollock the advent of Surrealism contributed to the part resolution of this problem. Gorky at this particular time was still close to his European masters, only Mirò had replaced Picasso, with all the lyricism that such a move would entail, while in addition providing a new theoretic outlook and a new vision.

Surrealism

Many of the best known European Surrealists fled to the States in 1939 when war was declared in Europe, and though Gorky was already conversant and sympathetic with surrealist theories, the presence in New York of Breton, Mirò, and Matta had a further liberating effect on his vision. This sense of release was especially noticeable in a series of drawings from early in the 1940s made on site during a stay with the artist Saul Schary in Connecticut in which the whole landscape was activated with indecipherable cryptograms suggestive of fecundity and growth. It was here too that he painted Waterfall (1942) which technically represented a totally new approach with its washes of turpentine diluted oil paint and a far freer handling of line no longer confined by colour. Waterfall was abstract and yet succeeded in conveying the sense of water falling over rocks. Of greater significance, however, was the fact that, as in surrealist paintings, landscape had become mind- or inner-scape. It is important to underline that though Gorky was very close to Breton and Matta he never really adopted surrealist practices; he felt greater affinity with Kandinsky’s idea that beauty had its origins in an “internal necessity that springs from the soul.” Moreover, control was important to Gorky. He was a great perfectionist and therefore had no real sympathy with the idea of psychic automatism, though he understood full well the way the unexpected and accidental could form bridges to the unconscious mind and reveal another reality, an inner world that speaks of a primordial unity between man and the universe. In common with many artists who were to make up the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, rather than finding a compatibility with Freud Gorky found compatibility with Jung, rather than Freud, who spoke for an art practice that stressed the collective unconscious and was therefore beyond psychoanalytic interpretation.

However, in many cases the presence of the Surrealists, especially in New York, was irksome and gave rise to real resentment among local artists since the Surrealists were fêted as the celebrities of the art world and given the exhibition space the younger artists thought should have been theirs’ by right. Gorky’s case was different. It was through Breton’s support that he was able to sign a contract with Julien Levy, the dealer who had done the most to promote Surrealism in America. Breton and Duchamp persuaded Julien Levy that Gorky had come into his own and that his paintings were no longer derivative. He was no longer a Picasso copyist. With a regular stipend, Gorky finally achieved the financial stability he needed at a time when he had become responsible for a growing family; his eldest daughter, Maro, was born in 1943. Andre Breton also helped choose titles for the paintings that were to go on display at Gorky’s first one-man exhibition, which opened at Julien Levy’s Gallery on March 6, 1945. Breton also wrote the foreword to the catalogue. The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky emphasised the analogical character of Gorky’s vision that enabled the artist to turn his forms into hybrids that brought together the actually seen and the remembered. This closeness to the Surrealists was not totally advantageous to Gorky. Surrealism was anathema to Clement Greenberg, who accused Gorky of lacking “independence and masculinity of character,” an especially cruel and humiliating taunt to someone coming from Gorky’s background. Only two paintings were sold and no new patrons found for Gorky. From this point onwards Gorky was to suffer a catalogue of misfortunes. He had become “the unlucky one” just at the point when elements in his paintings were beginning to coalesce and he was at last receiving critical acclaim.

“The Unlucky One”

In 1946 Gorky was preparing for his second one-man show at Julien Levy’s Gallery when a fire broke out in his studio in Connecticut and all the canvases he had been working on were destroyed. Gorky was known to have a passion for fire, always building huge bonfires or, as in this case, stacking the pot-bellied wood burning stove too high. But he was also keenly aware that his family was said to live under a curse. His grandmother had set the local church on fire in revolt against God who had allowed her son to be tortured by the Turks. So when his studio was burning, he acted as if under that curse, not informing the fire brigade but trying to staunch the flames himself. This was to be the beginning of a litany of misfortunes that befell him; in 1947 he underwent extensive surgery for rectal cancer and in the same year his father died, but having kept his existence hidden even from his wife, he was unable to really mourn him and give vent to his grief. The following summer of ‘48 he broke his neck in a car accident and, while this was healing, suffered paralysis of his right arm and was convinced that he would never paint again. Finally his wife, ground down by his depression and worried on account of the children and his increasing violence, moved back to her parents’ house. Three weeks later, in July of 1948, Gorky hanged himself, leaving a note for them that said “Goodbye, my loveds.”

After the fire, Gorky at first had characteristically met adversity with renewed vigour, throwing himself into his work and recreating from memory the canvases that had been lost in the conflagration. There were also new paintings, such as Charred Beloved and The Betrothal. His canvases had become much more complex, his colour more muted and more chromatic, his textures denser; it was as if he had found his own language. The Plough and the Song (1947) is resonant with feeling, its subject matter probably a celebration of fertility though identification of the concatenation of shapes is virtually impossible. As in cubist paintings, forms and their meanings are multivalent. The Limit (1947), with its almost monochromatic expanse of gray, suggests a terrible emptiness and seems weighed down by a loneliness that reminds us of those orphaned and plaintive eyes of the young Vosdanig Adoian in the photo of himself and his mother. It is as if this sense of overwhelming loss never really left him despite his efforts to integrate himself in American society.

Viewing the paintings at the second Julien Levy Gallery exhibition, Greenberg conceded that Gorky had come into his own. But he significantly withheld the real accolade by insisting that Pollock was still the greater of the two. Predictably, Gorky no longer needed Greenberg’s approbation after his death. His fame spread and his prices at art auctions escalated. Historically, Gorky is now seen as a transitional figure marrying abstraction and surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism. But Gorky was no Surrealist despite his acute understanding of the relationship between poetry, memories of childhood, sex and pain. He did not share their scorn for fine art and for art history but was moved by a deep reverence for the craft and history of painting. There was no room in his practice for anti-art or non-art. Similarly Gorky was not a proto-Abstract Expressionist. Unlike artists such as Barnett Newman, Rothko, and Pollock he had no wish to deliver himself from the artistic hegemony of the European tradition. By identifying with the Europeans, Gorky never became an American artist, despite his naturalisation, as his friend de Kooning succeeded in doing. Like so many romantic artists, he had to wait for death to bring him.

© 2010, Anna Leung