Arshile Gorky at The Tate Modern, February 2010
Arshile Gorky at The Tate Modern, February 2010
After the recent retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko there is an attempt to resuscitate yet another lost American Master, Arshile Gorky. Lost because of his tragic early death, but also lost because his influence is now indecipherable as he basically established the conditions for the rise of Abstract Expressionism and then Pop Art. The central focus of the exhibition is Arshile Gorky’s portrait, taken from some extant, discovered photograph, of the young artist with his mother. She was a victim, for the exhibition is very quick to establish Gorky’s victim status, of a historical footnote, the 1915 Armenian genocide of which Adolf Hitler once declared: “who remembers the Armenian genocide?” His mother’s starvation at the hands of the retreating minions of the Ottoman Empire, his subsequent flight to America with his sister to be with their father is the stuff of romance fiction, yet Arshile Gorky nevertheless maintains a tragic pitifulness, for his art is clearly large in scale, large in heart and large in ambition. Firstly it’s important to establish that Gorky’s personal paintings are broadly realist whereas his landscapes, and other works, that seem to anticipate abstract expressionism, are abstract. Gorky is taken to depict his emotions, to lay bare his soul on canvas. Yet it’s a soul, and a mind, that’s worth discovering. His influences were Cezanne first, Picasso second. He took the name Gorky in homage to the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who had been a fellow travelling Bolshevik later murdered, its thought, by Stalin. Gorky is staking his claim from the outset to be an internationalist and a revolutionist. Almost a robust paradoxism in the name, he didn’t intend to imitate the former's fate. But fate and fatalism are enshrined in Gorky’s paintings, especially the personal, translucent paintings of his mother, Master Bill (Willem de Kooning, who seems to have been an acolyte…) and his own overwhelming self-portrait, where his hands are closed over, abstracted.. his mother’s pale emaciated features contrast with the orange crimsons of the background, her hands thrust forward, open, as if she is indeed begging for bread or for life. An earlier version of this painting is much sharper, much more downbeat, understated, muted in its use of colour.
Works from his Garden of Sochi and Image in Khorkon are simultaneously revelatory depictions of Gorky's lost childhood, mark a deepening engagement with surrealism and the works of Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico and the Catalan Modernist Joan Miro. At this time Gorky moved to Virginia to depict the landscape there, his work becomes increasingly involved, colourful and lyrical. Gorky's painting life, poised between his desire to be an internationalist and revolutionist (plus possibly some actual puzzlement about his real identity...) and the intimacy, knowingness, colour of these mid-period canvases, that often almost coalesce into complete images, but never quite. His work Waterfall (1943) looks almost like a depiction of two Balinese or Chinese dancers, then melts back into disparate elements, maybe a mountain landscape, torrents pouring down a mountainside. Gorky habitually works through this image, then a whole sequence of modulations on an overall theme. Gorky's life was difficult, even during the depression era when he had a good job and all his work from this period was on paper. Nevertheless Gorky was beginning to amass a considerable reputation. The year 1946 was fraught with crisis: a fire destroyed all his recent work, he was diagnosed with cancer and had to go through a serious operation, his wife leaves him, taking the children. But these events he is determined to resist, rebuilding his portfolio of work patiently, purely from memory. Two years later, his painting arm in a sling as a result of a car crash, Arshile Gorky (1904?-1949) commits suicide.
But its possible now to see that he was a precursor of the Pollocks and Warhols, and this exhibition should provide the viewer with a chance to see how an Old World artist in the New World began to re-fashion art and to create new possibilites in expression, colour and style.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
After the recent retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko there is an attempt to resuscitate yet another lost American Master, Arshile Gorky. Lost because of his tragic early death, but also lost because his influence is now indecipherable as he basically established the conditions for the rise of Abstract Expressionism and then Pop Art. The central focus of the exhibition is Arshile Gorky’s portrait, taken from some extant, discovered photograph, of the young artist with his mother. She was a victim, for the exhibition is very quick to establish Gorky’s victim status, of a historical footnote, the 1915 Armenian genocide of which Adolf Hitler once declared: “who remembers the Armenian genocide?” His mother’s starvation at the hands of the retreating minions of the Ottoman Empire, his subsequent flight to America with his sister to be with their father is the stuff of romance fiction, yet Arshile Gorky nevertheless maintains a tragic pitifulness, for his art is clearly large in scale, large in heart and large in ambition. Firstly it’s important to establish that Gorky’s personal paintings are broadly realist whereas his landscapes, and other works, that seem to anticipate abstract expressionism, are abstract. Gorky is taken to depict his emotions, to lay bare his soul on canvas. Yet it’s a soul, and a mind, that’s worth discovering. His influences were Cezanne first, Picasso second. He took the name Gorky in homage to the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who had been a fellow travelling Bolshevik later murdered, its thought, by Stalin. Gorky is staking his claim from the outset to be an internationalist and a revolutionist. Almost a robust paradoxism in the name, he didn’t intend to imitate the former's fate. But fate and fatalism are enshrined in Gorky’s paintings, especially the personal, translucent paintings of his mother, Master Bill (Willem de Kooning, who seems to have been an acolyte…) and his own overwhelming self-portrait, where his hands are closed over, abstracted.. his mother’s pale emaciated features contrast with the orange crimsons of the background, her hands thrust forward, open, as if she is indeed begging for bread or for life. An earlier version of this painting is much sharper, much more downbeat, understated, muted in its use of colour.
Works from his Garden of Sochi and Image in Khorkon are simultaneously revelatory depictions of Gorky's lost childhood, mark a deepening engagement with surrealism and the works of Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico and the Catalan Modernist Joan Miro. At this time Gorky moved to Virginia to depict the landscape there, his work becomes increasingly involved, colourful and lyrical. Gorky's painting life, poised between his desire to be an internationalist and revolutionist (plus possibly some actual puzzlement about his real identity...) and the intimacy, knowingness, colour of these mid-period canvases, that often almost coalesce into complete images, but never quite. His work Waterfall (1943) looks almost like a depiction of two Balinese or Chinese dancers, then melts back into disparate elements, maybe a mountain landscape, torrents pouring down a mountainside. Gorky habitually works through this image, then a whole sequence of modulations on an overall theme. Gorky's life was difficult, even during the depression era when he had a good job and all his work from this period was on paper. Nevertheless Gorky was beginning to amass a considerable reputation. The year 1946 was fraught with crisis: a fire destroyed all his recent work, he was diagnosed with cancer and had to go through a serious operation, his wife leaves him, taking the children. But these events he is determined to resist, rebuilding his portfolio of work patiently, purely from memory. Two years later, his painting arm in a sling as a result of a car crash, Arshile Gorky (1904?-1949) commits suicide.
But its possible now to see that he was a precursor of the Pollocks and Warhols, and this exhibition should provide the viewer with a chance to see how an Old World artist in the New World began to re-fashion art and to create new possibilites in expression, colour and style.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
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