By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
The drawings in the Arshile Gorky show at the Whitney Museum are, as you would expect, heartbreakingly beautiful. How could they be otherwise? It’s only a pity that the show is too big. The narrative bogs down. Gorky’s works need to be appreciated slowly, one at a time. After perusing the 30th or so of them from around 1946, you can begin to feel drained, notwithstanding an admiration for Gorky’s enterprise.
Gorky drew as he painted, with patient tenderness and discipline, the combination producing a kind of wistfully erotic and tantalizing mysteriousness. The poetry and melancholy that we see in the work dovetail with his biography, about which Gorky was notoriously misleading but which has naturally become the subject of one after another book. The story is irresistible and also meaningful to his art: a cliché of the doomed romantic, a tall, black-eyed, fatalistic man, Gorky began and ended life in spectacular misery. In between, he made himself into a legend in New York — in André Breton’s only-partly-surreal estimation, the most important painter in America.
The history is familiar by this point: he was born Vosdanik Adoian at the turn of the last century in Khorkom, a now destroyed village in the western Armenian province of Van, part of the Ottoman Empire. He didn’t speak until he was 6. His father left his mother, Shushan, and their children to find work in America, promising to send money so they could join him, which he never did.
After the siege of Van City by the Turks, the abandoned family fled the Turkish slaughter of Armenians by trekking east. Shushan was by all accounts a saintly woman who had already endured unspeakable horrors. Years earlier, her father, a priest, had been killed and his body nailed to the door of his church, and she had been forced by the Turks to watch her previous husband murdered. Now she starved herself to give her children what little food there was on the long march. Broken and impoverished, she died, with her son beside her.
All this clearly stayed with Gorky like a fresh wound. The show presents his drawings for paintings based on a photograph of himself and his mother taken by a studio photographer in Van. The photograph was to be sent to his father, a reminder, in case he had forgotten, that his family still existed. Shushan stares vacantly at the camera, as if already departed from the world. Gorky stands beside her, feet primly together, a little boy unsmilingly proffering a small bouquet to his long-lost parent. Gorky tried two different versions for his own expression in the drawings, one glaring, the other downcast, while his mother stays the same, frozen in time, profoundly beautiful and sad, as he wished for her to remain in his memory.
By then, Gorky had reached America and invented a new name: “Gorky” meant bitter in Russian, he reminded people. (As it happens, a similar-sounding word in Russian can also imply a life that’s up and down.) He claimed a kinship with the Russian writer, not knowing that Maxim Gorky was itself a pseudonym. Russians were baffled when they met him to discover he didn’t speak the language.
A preternaturally fluent draftsman, who had drawn obsessively as a child, Gorky now threw himself into art and was soon teaching (Mark Rothko became a student), haunting museums and making friends with artists like Stuart Davis, whose work, at one point, he would closely imitate, as he would so many artists. He settled in 1929 into a rented studio at 36 Union Square in Manhattan.
The exhibition speeds impatiently through Gorky’s long gestation: his decades of self-imposed servitude to Cézanne, Picasso, de Chirico. This encompasses all except the very last few years of his working life. He became a curiosity in the New York art world, immensely gifted, as everyone could plainly tell, but a supplicant to his chosen heroes to the point of self-abnegation and effacement. We are reminded in the first room of the show just how brilliantly Gorky absorbed and mimicked others.
It now seems right to call these model artists father figures. Gorky, evidently fearful to venture out on his own, established through obedient devotion an artistic heritage for himself, a formal foundation. In the long run, rather than turning him into merely a chameleon, these immersions became the basis for a synthetic breakthrough. Each artist gave him something he could use. Cézanne, among other things, taught him about negative space, Matisse about line, Picasso about metaphor and self-mythology.
As for imagery, he found refuge in fantasy. Abstraction, including Cubism and Surrealism, altered reality; so it allowed Gorky to disguise or suppress or veil the world, as he wished. A series of black-and-white drawings, “Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia,” dark and inert variations on a de Chirico — like everything by Gorky, superbly controlled — suggest deep loneliness and a feeling of claustrophobia. They imply a labyrinth of coded, troubled memories.
The way out from this labyrinth came via love and nature: in 1941, Gorky married Agnes Magruder, whom he called Mougouch (it meant “my little powerful one,” he said); two daughters were born shortly after. Summers in Virginia on a farm that Mougouch’s family had bought, combined with his new artistic infatuations — Miró, Kandinsky, André Masson, the young Matta, with whom he developed a strong paternalistic bond — led to change in his work.
Landscapes dissolve into sweet, undulating, liquid shapes, like pods or leaves or birds, fertile and sexual but indefinite. The forms flatten and dance. Gorky said the works were inspired by memories of childhood. They are complicated by erasures, scribbles and pentimenti, as if the memories are still buried or hard to retrieve. Color separates from line, the two now operating in joyful counterpoint.
The Surrealists, perceiving a comrade, hailed him and he became a star. That his legacy was to bridge Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism is a common theory repeated by the show. It belies the fact that Gorky, despite affinities, was never really a complete Surrealist — he was too serious and prudish and moral for the likes of Breton. Nor was his work swashbuckling and brawny enough for soon-to-be Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, who thought Gorky precious (de Kooning wisely defended him).
The show’s catalog, trying to place Gorky in history, adds that he continued to have a large influence over many later artists, up to today, which is true. But Gorky doesn’t need this ratification, and it misses the basic point: his identity was as a permanent exile, an artist reverent of others but finally, spiritually, apart from everyone else around him, a man who located himself and his happiness in a dream of his own lost childhood.
To watch Gorky explore various devices and motifs in one after another late, elliptical drawing is moving and inspiring until it becomes a little hard on the feet. The exhibition is a touching lesson in the consolations of art. Gorky threw himself into these rapturous late works just as his life was falling apart.
In 1946, his studio in Sherman, Conn., burned down with much of his art in it. An operation for rectal cancer forced him to use a colostomy bag. A fastidious man, Gorky found this unbearable. He fell into a severe and violent depression. His wife, in desperation, then succumbed to an affair with Matta. Gorky broke his neck and his painting arm was temporarily paralyzed in a car crash. He couldn’t sleep and was wracked by awful headaches.
The final straw came in 1948 with a drunken rampage, when he pushed his wife down a flight of stairs. He apologized. She fled with their children to Virginia. Gorky hanged himself. It happened that his eldest daughter was 5 at the time, the age he was when his father left him.
De Kooning wrote the best epitaph, as a letter to Art News magazine a year after Gorky’s death:
“In a piece on Arshile Gorky’s memorial show — and it was a very little piece indeed — it was mentioned that I was one of his influences. Now that is plain silly. When about 15 years ago, I walked into Arshile’s studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary continuously to make sure of where things and people come from, well then I come from 36 Union Square.”
He added that he was “glad that it is about impossible to get away from” Gorky’s influence because “as long as I keep it with myself I’ll be doing all right.”
“Sweet Arshile,” he said, “bless your dear heart.”
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