Rene — Arshile Gorky — SELF-MADE MAN
Topic(s): BookReview | Comments Off on Rene — Arshile Gorky — SELF-MADE MANSELF-MADE MAN
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
New Yorker
Sept 1 2003
How Arshile Gorky changed art.
Issue of 2003-09-08
Posted 2003-09-01
A headline in the Times of July 22, 1948, read “gorky’s cousin ends
life.” According to the brief obituary that followed, a Russian-born
American painter, forty-five years old, had hanged himself in a
barn on his property in Sherman, Connecticut. The story was full of
errors. The painter, Arshile Gorky, was unrelated to the celebrated
Communist writer Aleksey Peshkov, whose pen name was Maxim Gorky. He
was probably forty-eight years old, and was born Vosdanig Adoian,
in a village in Turkish Armenia. The Sherman property wasn’t his –
he was too poor to own much of anything – and the building that he
selected to die in was a shed. The obit’s major errors repeated lies
that Gorky regularly told about himself. He kept secret his memories
of the massacres, famine, and epidemics that decimated his people
during the First World War. He spoke passionately of his mother
but rarely of her death in his presence, at the age of thirty-nine,
perhaps of starvation. Gorky’s widow, Agnes Magruder, who adopted his
pet name for her, Mougouch (a term of endearment that meant “little
mighty one,” he told her), didn’t learn until ten years after his
death that he was Armenian. But the writer’s sketchiness was also
due to a profound public ignorance of the American avant-garde in
the years before Abstract Expressionism burst upon the world. Even
today, when Gorky is enshrined in art history as a crucial figure in
the shift of modern-art leadership from Paris to New York, and his
paintings resell for millions, a peculiar obscurity clings to him.
Hayden Herrera is the author of a lively and consequential biography of
Frida Kahlo. Her new book, “Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work” (Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux; $45), gives us Gorky whole. Herrera is Mougouch’s
god-daughter, and her monumental, superbly crafted book, thirty-some
years in the making, supplants two recent Gorky biographies by authors
who also had personal reasons for writing. “From a High Place” (1999)
is by Matthew Spender, the son of the poet Stephen and the husband of
Maro, the older of Mougouch and Gorky’s two daughters. “Black Angel”
(2000) is by Nouritza Matossian, who was impelled by her identification
with Gorky as a fellow-Armenian. Spender is brisk and engaging,
Matossian ardent and often moving, but neither rivals Herrera’s
comprehensiveness, which is indispensable to a subject who cannot but
remain elusive. Beyond being an artist’s artist – “a better handler of
brush and paint than anyone he was radically influenced by, including
Picasso and Miró,” in the judgment of Clement Greenberg – Gorky might
be termed art’s artist: an embodiment of what it means to value the
practice of art not wisely but totally. Herrera installs Gorky in
the reader’s mind as a living, bedevilling, unquenchable enigma.
He was tall, dark, and outrageously handsome, with dramatic black
hair and mustache, a full mouth, a prow of a nose, and large, soulful
eyes under a wide brow. His hands were long, beautiful, and always in
motion. He was animated, cocksure, and often funny, with the air of
a melancholy clown. He was puritanical, obsessed with cleanliness,
and fatalistic. De Kooning said of Gorky, “He had a difficult life.
Everything was kind of gloomy and nothing really worked so good,
paintings and life and the money. And he would say, ‘Ah, that’s another
cup of coffee, another piece of pie.’ He said it with a certain kind
of Armenian accent.” The voice of de Kooning, with its traces of his
own Dutch patois, is one of many that enchant in the book. It was a
generation of wonderful talkers. Jackson Pollock, perhaps thinking
of the popular perception of abstract painters as depraved crazies,
reacted to Gorky’s suicide this way: “Why give a lot of bastards
a chance to say ‘I told you so’? And you don’t sort of take others
with you, scarring them like Gorky did with that note when he hung
himself, ‘Goodbye, dears’ or some shit. The guy always did talk too
much.” (Accounts differ on Gorky’s suicide note, scrawled in chalk
on a crate; the generally accepted version, which sounds like him,
is “Goodbye My Loveds.”) Besides being volcanically creative, the
tiny downtown art world of the nineteen-forties was very tough.
Gorky grew up in a dark, rich peasant culture that he transposed to the
Caucasus in his frequent, lyrical reminiscing about it. His childhood
was magical in his memory and the source of numerous motifs in his
mature style of surrealistic abstraction: plowshares, apricots,
millstones, his mother’s embroidered apron. With a biographer’s
occupational tic, Herrera makes far too much of these references. She
interprets a particular shape in his abstract work variously as a
boot, buttocks, breasts, a belly, and a butter churn. Gorky’s art
burns its psychic fuel cleanly and, in my experience, transcends
whatever got him going. His famous paintings from a photograph of
himself as a boy with his mother (and such others as “Portrait of
Myself and My Imaginary Wife”) are fairer game, and Herrera gives
strong descriptions of them; the mother’s eyes are “open but unseeing,
like the depthless eyes of the dead.” Herrera has an enviable eye for
Gorky’s extraordinary color sense, sorting out the hues of one work as
“olives, ochres, aubergines, fleshy pinks, and various browns” – just
right. And her characterization of his painterly intelligence, which
squares sensual abandon with exacting discipline, can’t be topped:
“voluptuous and astringent.” She firmly grasps his breakthrough of
the early forties: a separation of line and colored shape, somewhat
like disjoined melody and harmony in jazz, which, as she writes,
“aerates the composition so that every part of the painting expands
and breathes.” This is one painter’s biography whose chapters of
formal analysis aren’t a dutiful slog between anecdotes.
Herrera begins her book with a barbaric scene. In 1903, in an ancient
monastery church near Lake Van, Turkey, “Arshile Gorky’s grandmother,
the widow Hamaspiur, had brought the family together to hold a vigil
for her youngest son, sixteen-year-old Nishan, who had vanished
several days earlier. She suspected that he had been abducted by
Kurds, for he had fallen in love with a Kurdish girl whose brother
took offense. . . . Only five years earlier, her husband, Sarkis Der
Marderosian, the last of a long line of Armenian apostolic priests,
had been nailed to the door of the church where he served in Van
City.” As the family prayed, there was a thud at the door. Outside,
they found Nishan’s blood-drenched body. Months of wild grief later,
“to revenge herself against God,” Hamaspiur set the monastery church
on fire. “Arshile Gorky would look back with admiration at his
grandmother’s rebellious spirit,” Herrera writes. This tale is family
lore, passed on by relatives – notably Gorky’s worshipful sister
Vartoosh, whose son Karlen Mooradian devoted his life to documenting
her hagiographic tales of the artist. Vartoosh and Gorky emigrated
together to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1920 before moving to
Providence, where they briefly joined their father, a laborer who had
left the family in 1906. Two other sisters came over in 1916. Family
members agreed that Gorky, while normal in other ways, never spoke
until he was six years old, but they had conflicting memories of his
first words: “Mother!”; “No, I won’t!”; “I am here”; “I am crying”;
or “Money, money, money. That’s all you ever talk about, money.”
Convinced that he was cursed in life, Gorky told friends that his
mother had called him “the black one, the unlucky one who will come
to a no-good end.”
The siege of Van, in 1915, is well documented. Herrera gives a
harrowing account of an Armenian district, Aikesdan, that held out
against Turkish bombardment and assault for four weeks until it
was rescued by Russian troops. The teen-age Gorky – an ammunition
carrier to Aikesdan’s poorly armed defenders, according to Vartoosh
– endured that and other traumas. Why did he suppress them to the
extent of denying his Armenian identity? Herrera posits shame and
a refusal of victimhood; “starving Armenians” were proverbial in
America in the nineteen-twenties. Not to be pitied, Gorky cast
himself as a Georgian, at a subsequent cost of embarrassment when
he met people who, unlike him, spoke Russian. His résumé referred
to experience in Paris, which he had never visited. He plagiarized
published poets and artists in love letters. For many years, the
look of his art was brazenly secondhand. In the nineteen-twenties,
he followed Cézanne almost stroke for stroke. In the thirties, he
became a standing joke for hewing so closely to Picasso. Gleeful
colleagues needled him when some new Picassos with runny paint
contradicted his didactic insistence on the necessity of painting
cleanly, like the Spaniard. Gorky responded promptly, “If he drips,
I drip.” In truth, Gorky’s self-imposed apprenticeship to Picasso
was the crucible of his greatness. For him, modern art – meaning
Picasso, above all – constituted a tradition with formal structures
as imperative as perspective was in Renaissance art and chiaroscuro
was in Baroque. “Reflection of Picasso is necessary on almost a moral
basis,” he said. Gorky’s late style, which freed painting from the
pictorial carpentry of cubism, advanced the tradition from within.
Rejecting his father’s expectation that he would be a factory worker,
Gorky enrolled in Boston’s New School of Design in 1922 and dove into
the study of art, partly in schools but mainly in museums. He was
savagely proud. When a teacher disparaged his work, he destroyed the
canvas that he was working on and walked out of the class for good.
He took menial jobs and earned money for a time on the vaudeville
stage, chalking likenesses of American Presidents, one a minute, on a
blackboard. He later told of swimming out into the Charles River to
drown himself and being driven back to shore by the sudden thought,
“What about painting?” In 1925, he moved to New York, where he became
a charismatic teacher (one of his students was Mark Rothko) and a
dashing presence. In 1929, he moved into a space at 36 Union Square
which he rented for the rest of his life. Herrera writes that Gorky
would stride into the square in “a long black overcoat, a red scarf,
and either a proletarian-looking wool knit cap or, on days when he
wanted to look prosperous or gangsterish, a black felt hat tilted
forward over his eyes.” He haunted museums. His favorite Old Masters
were Uccello and Ingres, both of them radical engineers of style. One
day at the Metropolitan, a woman reacting to his long hair and beard
quipped, “Are you Jesus Christ?” He answered, “No, Madam. I am Arshile
Gorky.” He had settled on the name in Boston, after toying with Archie
Gunn and Archie Colt, aliases that were inspired by silent Westerns.
Gorky’s self-taught erudition and aggressive principles, however
exasperating, carried weight in the small world of New York
modern artists. According to de Kooning, Gorky was one of the
“Three Musketeers” of the scene, along with Stuart Davis and the
shadowy Russian aristocrat John Graham. They were the artists whom
nearly everyone talked about and deferred to, although sales and
exhibitions were rare. Like many struggling artists in the thirties,
Gorky enlisted in the Works Progress Administration. A photograph in
Herrera’s book shows him confidently explaining his art to a sullenly
skeptical Fiorello La Guardia. He won a commission for Newark Airport,
and his ten panels of a grand, cubistic mural on themes of aviation
were installed there in 1937, to a storm of public controversy. (All
but two panels have been lost.) He was a Stalinist to the end –
“Stalin was for him a father figure, inviolable,” Mougouch told
Herrera – in the eccentric notions that passed for his politics,
but he disdained Social and Socialist Realism, which he delighted in
calling “poor art for poor people.” Gorky had and lived a rhapsodic,
princely image of the artist. No matter how impoverished, he always
somehow managed to lay in more and costlier art supplies than any of
his peers and to miss no opportunity for flaunting it.
Gorky “shied away from girls,” a friend said. “But girls didn’t
shy away from him.” He idealized and was awkward with women, whom
he called, fancifully, “skybabies.” He was chary of sex. One former
girlfriend told Herrera, “You thought that at the back of his mind,
even while having intercourse, he was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness,
all my strength is going! I should save it up for painting!'” When
trouble arose between them, the same woman said, “The only way he
could deal with me was to get hysterical and hit me and threaten
suicide.” He had a few such hapless affairs and a brief marriage,
to a model and figure skater named Marny George. Then, in February,
1941, he met the lovely, brilliant nineteen-year-old Agnes Magruder.
She was the adventurous daughter of a Navy captain – she worked as a
secretary for a Chinese Communist organization – and her modest social
elevation tickled Gorky’s vanity. Upset by the match, the Magruders
provided scant support, but the growing Gorky family spent summers
at their country home in Virginia, where Gorky, working outdoors,
made several series of astonishing drawings not so much from as
inside nature: botanical and insect forms quivering with itchy
vitality while participating in an august formal order. Mougouch
was self-sacrificing. “Dear Joking Jesus how wonderful it will be
when he has a studio really his own,” she wrote to her confidante,
the collector and artist Jeanne Reynal. She put Gorky first for as
long as her sanity could bear it.
The war years brought glamorous European refugees to New York,
and Gorky’s work strongly impressed many of the artists among
them, including Joan Miró and Fernand Léger. He was befriended and
influenced, fatefully, by the Chilean-born wunderkind Roberto Matta
Echaurren. Shallow but dazzling, Matta had hit on novel effects
of untethering line from shape in paintings of sexually voracious,
menacing motifs. He was a toast of the uptown art world, where the
“imported surrealists,” in Clement Greenberg’s contemptuous phrase,
formed a deluxe avant-garde remote from that of the tatterdemalion
American painters. The leading galleries were the Pierre Matisse,
Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy, which,
in 1945, gave Gorky his first major solo show. The uptowners embraced
Gorky, whose colorful character and beautiful wife, no less than
his genius, made him a prime local attraction. André Breton became
a close friend and promoter, pronouncing him “the only painter in
America,” and helping him to title his works. (Many Gorky titles are
jewels of laconic lyricism: “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” “Water of
the Flowery Mill,” “Diary of a Seducer,” “One Year the Milkweed.”)
The prudish Gorky was an odd duck in this arch, gamy, free-loving
company, and his association with it alienated him from his downtown
compeers – including de Kooning, who nonetheless loyally defended him.
Gorky had already been at odds with the swaggering Pollock, who
sneered at his tenderly brushed work, deeming it epicene. Pollock’s
champion, Greenberg, lashed out at Gorky in a review in The Nation,
raising a suspicion that he “lacked independence and masculinity of
character.” The slur made Gorky frantic. Between uptown cynicism and
downtown machismo, his was a spirit besieged.
Matta is the villain in the frightening climax of Herrera’s biography,
though such are her powers of sympathy that a reader can’t quite hate
him. Jeanne Reynal wrote to Mougouch about “little two-penny cads
like Matta,” who abandoned one wife when she gave birth to twins and
cheated on a second (who cheated on him with Pierre Matisse). Matta was
an amatory multi-tasker. He pursued Mougouch. Amused but scornful, she
saw him as “a spoiled boy who wants to masquerade as de Sade.” Then a
cascade of calamities befell Gorky, starting in 1946, when his studio
at the Sherman estate of a wealthy architect, where the Gorkys had
begun staying the year before, burned down with much of the artist’s
work in it. Later that year, he had an operation for rectal cancer,
which forced him to use a colostomy bag. He became severely and
sometimes violently depressed, except during intervals of inspired
work. On June 17, 1948, the unhappy Mougouch began an affair with
Matta, whose indiscretion quickly made it common knowledge. “It was
perhaps the worst thing I ever did,” Mougouch told Herrera, “but I
did it.” In a car crash on June 26th, Gorky’s neck was broken and
his painting arm was temporarily paralyzed. Writhing in traction,
he raged at the nurses who urged him to be brave: “Why on earth
should I be brave? I’ve spent my whole life making myself tremble
like a leaf at whatever happens, and now you want me to be like an
unpeeled onion. I have no more skins.” Back in Sherman, wearing a
bulky brace, he drank heavily. He arranged to meet Matta in Central
Park and tried pathetically to beat up the younger man. He endeavored
to control his anger with Mougouch, but one night he got drunk and
went on a rampage. He pushed her down a flight of stairs, then tried
to reassure his daughters, telling them, “My little darlings, you must
realize I’m an artist and artists sometimes have to act a bit crazy.
That’s why I’m like this now. Do you understand?” The next day, July
16th, Mougouch fled with the girls to Virginia. Five days later,
Gorky was dead.
Gorky’s suicide was a shock and perhaps an efficacious goad to the
New York painters, whose revolutionary styles were taking definitive
form. Gorky himself was no revolutionary, but it was clear to many
that his hand-to-hand wrestling with Picasso had justified them all.
In 1949, de Kooning wrote a letter to the editor of Art News,
protesting a review that had cited him as an influence on Gorky. He
said, “When, about fifteen 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.” In another encomium, de Kooning made
startling use of the future tense: “I tell you one thing, some of
his paintings will be much better than some of the ones by Picasso,
Matisse, El Greco.” The implication is that quality is not inherent
in works of art but is something that happens to them.
Herrera modestly makes no firm assessment of Gorky’s standing among
the modern masters, but her book helps to clear the way for one. Her
circumstantial appreciation of the artist and his times counters
the standard distortions of Abstract Expressionism: Greenbergian
modernism, which rates painters by their roles in a forward march
toward color-field abstraction; he-man triumphalism, with what Harold
Rosenberg called the Action painters as cowboy conquistadores; and
anti-American critiques of the movement as an ideological construct of
the Cold War. Gorky, besides lacking a sock-in-the-eye trademark look,
lends no support to those stories. Thus his persistent obscurity
– which is overcome one person at a time, by stepping up to his
pictures and looking at them. Having done so myself, I find that
“better” – de Kooning’s word – fits the experience. By comparison,
even Picasso, and certainly Pollock, can seem to sacrifice too much
poetry at the altar of grandeur. Hard to use for or against any idea,
Gorky is impossible to use up.