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Arshile Gorky Is Mother's Boy

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  • Arshile Gorky Is Mother's Boy

    ARSHILE GORKY IS MOTHER'S BOY

    This is London
    Feb 11 2010
    UK

    More articles by Brian Sewell Armenia, the oldest of Christian
    countries, was once a land where art and architecture flourished. It
    was, like Britain, a far outpost of the Roman Empire, but, unlike this
    country, did not sink into a dark age with that empire's retrenchment,
    division and fall. In what is now north-eastern Turkey and beyond
    its borders there, are the remains of great churches and monasteries,
    architectural marvels, mathematically ingenious, the masonry crisp cut.

    Melancholy: The Artist and his Mother -- "here is more than personal
    tragedy, here is a greater grief for his identity"

    In some, the paintings that decorated their walls still survive,
    despite the attempts of Muslims to wreck and ravage them for their
    too evident human imagery; their ghosts find definition in more
    resistant sculptural reliefs and, on a smaller scale, in manuscripts
    and miniatures.

    Absorbed into the Ottoman Empire by the westward march of the Turks,
    Armenia lost her borders and her nationality, but the heritage
    of a great culture, laid down more than a thousand years before,
    established patterns that were still current late in the 19th century.

    It was to these that any boy with burgeoning talent as an artist was
    compelled to turn for his education -- for there were no art schools
    -- to the painted images and gingerbread sculpture of the churches
    that were so much part of his daily life. Of these, Arshile Gorky
    was one -- a boy with a passionate urge to draw.

    Now perceived to be the last Surrealist and the first American
    Abstract Expressionist, Gorky was born in Armenia in 1904, we think,
    in a village near the city of Van. Many of the churches to which
    he had access were destroyed during the course of the last century;
    Armenians had long been persecuted, their response to pogrom so pacific
    that in 1915 the Turks contemptuously embarked on a policy of genocide
    so total that none survived -- even now the wary traveller from the
    west does not utter the word Armenian.

    "Small husband": the 1912 photograph of Gorky and his mother which
    was the inspiration for the picture above

    A quarter of a century ago, seven ruined churches were rotting in the
    hills near Van; constantly quarried for hearthstones and doorsteps,
    they may by now be utterly destroyed but, by the grace of God,
    the church of the Holy Cross still stands on the deserted island
    of Akhtamar in the great Lake of Van, with substantial examples of
    wall paintings and carvings of which Gorky was aware. His letters
    demonstrate how powerful were his recollections of childhood, and
    how much being an Armenian meant to him -- I respond to modern life
    as an Armenian from Van," he wrote from exile in America. Man cannot
    escape the sensibility of his time..." He was, indeed, in thrall to it.

    The traditional images of Armenian art are frontal and hieratic. In
    painting the proportions are elongated, but in sculpture they
    are stunted; faces in both are oval, the eyes large, unfocused and
    deep-socketed; what sense of volume there may be is implied by line and
    the sculpture is in low relief. These were the formulae that little
    Gorky carried with him when, with his mother and sister, he fled in
    1915 into the Russian borderland to the north-east; there, in 1919,
    in his arms, his mother died of starvation and grief, and his long
    journey to America began. He was fortunate; chance could so easily
    have sent him on the genocidal marches that wiped out more than a
    million Armenians when the Turks drove them south to die either en
    route or in the desert near Aleppo. The appalling events that were
    in some measure the experience of all Armenians in Turkey during and
    after the Great War formed Gorky's mind, burdening him with melancholy
    that was to overwhelm him.

    Dark: one of Gorky's splendid drawings, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia

    He escaped to America in 1920, hoping to join his father who had
    emigrated there years earlier to avoid being drafted into the Turkish
    army. The reconciliation failed. Living in Boston, Gorky developed
    a museum habit -- western cultures absorbed at random. Moving to New
    York in 1925, he joined the Grand Central School of Art as a student
    -- perhaps still only 21 -- but swiftly graduated to the status of
    monitor-teacher (I suspect the school was less grand than its name
    suggests) and remained there until 1931.

    America was hardly the place for a would-be painter between the
    wars -- Paris was pre-eminent, and even London could claim to
    be an intellectually livelier place until New York was given its
    chance by the Second World War. Gorky was neither well taught in the
    technical sense nor exposed to long traditions and established stimuli
    that could convert him from provincial fumbler into metropolitan
    genius. He became a mere imitator. As Cézanne was in high fashion,
    Gorky clumsily and tentatively tried his brushwork and colour
    without understanding the purpose of either. Aware of Picasso,
    presumably from illustrated magazines rather than direct experience,
    he tried his hand at decorative abstractions of still life reduced
    to flat patterns. When Picasso developed a mannerism of cool tones
    and heavy intersecting lines, jagged and angular, unrewarding to
    the point of emptiness, Gorky mimicked him. To Picasso's large,
    heavy semi-classical faces his response was powerful and emotional,
    recognising in them a character that recalled Armenian art -- but he
    broke new ground in imitating them.

    The Picasso paths exhausted, Gorky turned to Miró for mentor and
    produced jazzy imitations of no merit. He became a Surrealist, though
    only in the most debilitated sense, and fell under the influence of
    Matta, a tag-end member of that by then desuetudinous group. What
    little originality there is in Gorky's work is in the paintings of
    the mid-Forties, when his landscape abstractions struck an authentic
    personal note -- but had his scribbles and drips not been adopted
    with enthusiasm by American painters and noisily promoted as Abstract
    Expressionism, these paintings too would seem as negligible as all
    the others.

    Tate Modern has given Gorky a far larger and grander exhibition than he
    deserves, for he is, at best, a minor painter, often uncomprehending
    and incompetent. Many visitors, unaware of the unrelenting propaganda
    that since his death in 1948 has presented his work as "the last
    great flowering of Surrealism and the first great flowering of modern
    American painting" (Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue 1965), will
    wonder why they have paid a tenner to look at so many canvases that
    are obviously no better than dim-witted imitations.

    His early paintings suggest that he hardly knew how to control the
    consistency and texture of paint or with which brushes to apply it,
    and that for at least the first decade he was a clumsy and ignorant
    amateur.

    The case is different with his drawings; these suggest that he
    responded with sensibility, intelligence and a high degree of technical
    skill to the academic teaching of drawing in his day, that in drawings
    he could express far more expertly any interest he had in form and
    volume, light and space, and that with extraordinary skill he could
    imitate in graphite, and in pen and ink, the related techniques of
    etching. I am convinced that in two portrait studies of the later
    Thirties, he had looked intelligently at those masters of economy,
    Ingres and Cocteau, and that in the paintings of a decade later it
    is the drawn line that lends order to the chaos of surreal forms,
    often Dalí-like, in a fantasy of hubbub and disorder.

    To assume, as the jabberwocky-driven critic Clement Greenberg did,
    that Gorky was a painter of more than national importance" is to
    assume that he knew what he was doing. He did not. His paintings were a
    combination of idiom -- first borrowed and then habitual -- with happy
    and unhappy accident. In the late works, the images scribbled, doodled,
    smudged and the colour scrubbed on to the canvas or, occasionally,
    thinly staining it with a wash, as in contemporary Parisian tachisme,
    he was released from all formal responsibilities.

    It is easy to see how these characteristics could be enlisted as
    justification for the genius of unpremeditated spontaneity in the
    unconscious mind and hand claimed by his immediate contemporary
    Willem de Kooning, and by the slightly younger Jackson Pollock, both
    of whom served to bolster Gorky's reputation as the stud who sired
    their rough and ready kind of gestural Abstract Expressionism. We
    should blame him for the scribbles of Cy Twombly too.

    A pair of early paintings may, for their immediate appeal to the
    emotions, slow the sane man's hurrying pace. They are near identical
    portraits of Gorky and his Mother as they were in 1912, based on
    a photograph taken then, but not begun until 1926 or so. Neither is
    finished; on one he spent a decade, on the other at least half as long
    again, but there is little evidence of heavy reworking or adjustment
    and nothing to suggest how much their development was inter-dependent.

    Hieratic, ancient Armenian in a formula revised through the eyes and
    harmonies of Pink Period Picasso, they date from a thousand years
    before. Into them Gorky put many layers of meaning: they tell us of
    his memories of Van, perhaps even of the enthroned Virgin Mary carved
    on the wall of Akhtamar, of his small husband" responsibility for his
    mother in the absence of his father, of a certain social status implied
    in his dapper shoes and the collar of his overcoat (is it velvet or
    Astrakhan, both a sign of difference perhaps important to a man who
    has had to earn a pittance as a labourer in factories?), and of a
    whole nation driven from ancestral land and property; here is more
    than personal tragedy, here is a greater grief for his identity --
    I am an Armenian"; here too he expresses fellowship with Picasso's
    wider-ranging melancholy imagery.

    Gorky came to a wretched end. In January 1946 fire destroyed the
    contents of his studio -- two dozen paintings, his books and "all the
    drawings of these past three years ...". In March rectal cancer was
    diagnosed, colostomy the consequence. Recovering, during the summer,
    he completed 292 drawings "and they are good too," he said. How could
    they be? -- the sane man asks -- and in February 1947 a reviewer damned
    them as doodlings of only psychological interest. In December, Gorky
    was depressed enough to ask his daughter Maro, then not quite four,
    to choose the tree from which to hang himself. Six months later, by
    then demoralised by increasing estrangement from his family, a road
    accident broke his neck and disabled his painting arm; his rage and
    depression worsening, on 16 July 1948 his wife and children left him.

    Five days later Gorky hanged himself -- with an already broken neck
    it was, perhaps, an easier death than we might think.

    Greenberg immediately extolled him as "one of the most important
    painters of his generation anywhere in the world" -- and that, of
    course, is the gospel of this exhibition. Alas, much though I would
    like him to have been the Armenian Michelangelo, very little in our
    thoroughly mendacious art world could be further from the truth.
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