‘Arshile Gorky’: The Picasso of Washington Square
By ANDREW SOLOMON
Hayden Herrera has written the definitive biography of Arshile Gorky —
lucid, persuasive, meticulous, intimate and refreshingly cleareyed. Gorky is the
sort of artist who in his life as much as his work invites extreme responses;
and some of his biographers and critics have been unable to avoid lionizing him
as the singular genius of his generation or dismissing him as a slave to greater
masters. Herrera recognizes his strengths and weaknesses. ”Arshile Gorky: His
Life and Work” makes the case for his position as the bridge between European
Cubism and Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, but acknowledges that
some of his work is simply a restatement of Matisse, Picasso or Miro.
Herrera is able to capture the grandeur and expansiveness of his personality.
Gorky was a master at constructing myths about himself, and Herrera describes
those myths and recognizes their power without buying into them. She is also a
capable art historian, the author of volumes on Frida Kahlo and Matisse, and
this book gives rigorous and insightful, if sometimes rather literal, readings
of Gorky’s work. The thoroughness of her research can become tiring, but if you
are interested in reading 600 pages about Gorky, these are the 600 pages to
read.
Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian sometime around 1900 in Turkish
Armenia. Though he survived the Armenian massacres, famine and migration, he saw
his mother die of starvation. He never escaped the shadow of early traumas. In
1920, he emigrated to the United States, and within a few years began to
construct a new identity: he took the name Arshile Gorky, pretending to be a
nephew of the writer Maxim Gorky, unaware that ”Maxim Gorky” was itself a nom
de plume. Unhappy with his past, he denied being Armenian and claimed to be from
southern Russia, even though he didn’t speak Russian. He lied about his age and
his education. These falsehoods he kept up beyond all intimacies; his wife did
not know his true origins until some 10 years after he died. He even kept secret
from her the fact that his father was, during the early years of their marriage,
alive and living in New England; by Gorky’s account, he had ridden away on a
horse in Russia.
Gorky’s life was his art. He began as a close follower of trends in European
painting, and was mockingly called the ”Picasso of Washington Square.” But
while the work he imitated dealt with formal issues, Gorky’s own work was always
intensely emotional. Already in the 1920’s he was beginning some of his
masterworks, including the haunting ”Artist and His Mother,” which he would go
on reworking until 1942; it was a melancholy figurative painting of a boy
blocked off from the object of his affections. Like his other work at this time
it was densely layered: Gorky painted and then scraped back and repainted and
scraped back to give his canvases a heavy, worked quality, coat upon coat of
paint.
Through the mid-1930’s, his work has a starkness that reflected his personal
loneliness and his strained relationship with the country he had adopted. By the
late 30’s, Gorky had moved on to his mature style, a form of figurative
abstraction, full of references to the real world but elliptical in its content,
and completed with thinner washes and less reworking. In the particularly
refined ”Garden in Sochi” series of 1941, he uses biomorphic shapes that are
loose and painterly to create a dreamlike atmosphere. It was at about this time
that he attached himself to the Europeans who came to New York to escape the
war, including Andre Breton and Yves Tanguy. They represented a cosmopolitanism
that was intimidating to Gorky, and later in life he would claim that they had
been his personal ruination. But they were great supporters, and Breton declared
Gorky’s paintings ”an art entirely new . . . a leap beyond the ordinary,” at a
time when American critics were giving him only lukewarm attention. The
Europeans’ ability to inject humor into serious matters, and to work freely and
automatically, playing the conscious and subconscious against each other, were
transformative for Gorky.
In 1941, Gorky met his true love and second wife, Agnes Magruder, whom he
called Mougouch. She was 19, a lively and intelligent woman from a good family
who was forever torn between the free spirit of her American childhood and the
wish to be a good wife to Gorky — whose Armenian standard of domesticity placed
women in a distinctly subservient role. She was to be a tireless advocate for
him. Their early life was full of fun: they spent long romantic stretches in the
country, mixed with the great artists of their time in New York, struggled to
make ends meet and danced on the roof outside their apartment. In the period
after he met Mougouch, Gorky’s happiness spilled forth into his work. The
eternal Armenian pain and intensity remained, but in paintings like his pivotal
”Waterfall,” he developed the confident use of line and richness of
brushstroke that were to distinguish him in his later life. These works are
sensual and electrifying.
But this period of happiness shattered in the face of several disasters. In
1946, Gorky’s studio burned down, taking with it much of his life’s work. Then
he developed rectal cancer and had to have part of his colon removed, leaving
him reliant on a colostomy apparatus. The joy went out of his life and his
paintings even as his technique became more sublime in works such as ”The
Limit” and ”Agony.” Mougouch, feeling increasingly closed off from her
husband, had a brief liaison. As Gorky’s depression escalated, he feared that
Mougouch would leave him. Then he was in a car accident and broke his neck; his
right arm was partly paralyzed. He developed a bleak depression. Mougouch
finally decided, after he threw her down the stairs in a fit of anger, that
though she loved him, she had to separate in order to protect their two small
children. Gorky sank into a deep and unremitting despair, and on July 21, 1948,
he hanged himself.
His paintings, which had enjoyed mixed success during his life, came to be
much treasured after his death, and the same works he had sold for under a
thousand dollars were soon valued in the tens and hundreds of thousands, later
millions. The critic Clement Greenberg, who had been grudging with praise while
Gorky was alive, became his champion. ”American art cannot afford Gorky’s
death,” he wrote.
This is the archetype of an artist’s life: full of suffering, loss, great
love, conflict, desolation, suicide and genius understood too late. Herrera
keeps it fresh for us. Her connection to the material feels intimate; and as it
turns out, it is intimate. Her father married Mougouch quite soon after Gorky’s
death. This detail is dropped in rather casually toward the end of the book; it
should be up at the front. But the intimacy, whatever its source, has allowed
Herrera to write with authority and a moving fond gentleness. Her book leaves
you wishing that you had known Gorky.
Andrew Solomon’s ”Noonday Demon” received a National Book Award in 2002. He
is currently writing a book about families grappling with traumatic difference.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; With Denial, Mendacity and Suicide, a Magnet for
Biographers
By ROBERTA SMITH
ARSHILE GORKY
His Life and Work
By Hayden Herrera
Illustrated. 767 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $45.
The arrival of ”Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work” by Hayden Herrera
confirms that the Armenian-born American painter has largely eluded the three
hefty biographies that have clustered around the centennial of his birth in the
early 1900’s.
First was ”From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky” (1999) by Matthew
Spender, a sculptor and writer who is married to Gorky’s older daughter, Maro.
Then came ”Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky” (2000) by Nouritza
Matossian, a London-based music critic of Armenian descent.
Ms. Herrera, the author of an acclaimed biography of Frida Kahlo, has her own
Gorky connection. Her godmother is Mougouch, as Gorky renamed Agnes Magruder
(now Agnes Gorky Fielding), an independent-minded 20-year-old socialite when he
met and married in 1941. (Without explanation, Ms. Herrera also mentions that
her father was Mougouch’s second husband.)
Yet while these books provide vastly more information about the artist’s
extraordinary life, none ties his achievement to history, art history or his
tortured psyche as memorably as Harold Rosenberg’s slim, fiercely lucid ”Arshile
Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea” of 1962.
Gorky’s saga is a biographer magnet, bracketed as it is by the Ottoman
Empire’s killing of more than a million Armenians in World War I (during which
his mother starved to death) and his death by suicide in 1948. In between he
found salvation in denial, fabrication and an inordinate ambition to be a great
painter.
By 1926 he was living in Greenwich Village, having shed his real name (Vosdanik
Adoian) and recast himself as Russian, a cousin of Maxim Gorky. Over the next 15
years he painstakingly worked his way through Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso and Miró
to the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism. The voluptuous forms and glowing
colors of his late abstractions were inspired by memories of the landscape of
his childhood, recalled in three breakthrough summers of drawing from nature on
a northern Virginia farm belonging to Mougouch’s family.
Then, within 18 months beginning in 1946, Gorky endured a devastating studio
fire; a colostomy for rectal cancer; and a car accident that left his neck
broken and his painting arm paralyzed. Finally, the marriage that had brought
happiness and artistic fulfillment collapsed under the strain. Mougouch had a
brief affair with the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta Echaurren, a close friend
of the couple. In physical and emotional agony, Gorky hanged himself.
Ms. Herrera’s ”Gorky” is the most thoroughly researched and reliable, and
it devotes the most space to Gorky’s art. She argues convincingly that Gorky was
born in 1900 rather than 1903, ’04 or ’05, and gives the frankest discussion of
his sex life. Like Mr. Spender, she reappraises Mougouch’s predicament, seeing
her affair with Matta as desperation, not betrayal. But she lacks his ease as a
writer and does not, for example, detail as vividly Gorky’s bonds with his
strange, sometimes violent Armenian relatives or his early friendships with
Stuart Davis, John Graham and Willem de Kooning.
For long stretches Ms. Herrera’s Gorky is vague and out of focus, especially
in the book’s shapeless, repetitive first half, which at times seems barely
edited. We learn more than once that Gorky had a mania for work and that he was
attracted to beautiful young women he could ”teach and mold.” While
elucidating, Ms. Herrera’s meticulous analyses of individual paintings can drag
on or conclude with banal interpretations.
Perhaps Ms. Herrera felt hobbled by the crowded field. She seems to have
included every fact she unearthed. Some are fascinating, like Gorky’s putting a
1917 date on a 1937 portrait for a show at the Museum of Modern Art. Many are
clutter, including the names of the play and theater in Cincinnati where one of
Gorky’s girlfriends met her unidentified husband. Perhaps the problem is that
Gorky’s tumultuous life was not, like Kahlo’s, explicated in passionate letters
and overtly autobiographical paintings.
Ultimately, Ms. Herrera’s book is saved by a Frida of its own: Mougouch,
whose letters she quotes from extensively and to telling effect. Once Mougouch
enters the picture, Ms. Herrera’s insights sharpen, the pace picks up and the
story becomes a portrait of a rich and unusual union that made possible some
great painting.
In addition to giving Gorky two daughters whom he adored, Mougouch was
willingly molded into an artist’s wife in the most laudable sense. She
identified totally with him and functioned as his personal aesthetic sounding
board and liaison with the art world. Yet something in her background and
perhaps in Gorky’s example enabled her to remain or become her own person, and
her letters provide an intimate, oddly mature account of their seven years
together and their painful disintegration. Although she never knew about her
husband’s Armenian past, as Gorky’s tendencies toward jealously, violence and
paranoia were worsened by his tribulations, Mougouch gradually realized that his
problems were bigger than both of them. Worn down by his raging rejection and
domination, she turned to the affair with Matta that, she later wrote, ”ruined
my life in one zip.”
By the end of Ms. Herrera’s accelerating narrative, you may wish it would
continue, following Gorky’s widow and daughters as they come to terms with the
legacy he left them. Perhaps Ms. Herrera’s next book will tell that story. It
seems to be one that she knows exceptionally well.
Published: 08 – 20 – 2003 , Late Edition – Final , Section E , Column 1 ,
Page 8
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