The Triumph of Achilles the Bitter

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York City, a definitive Arshile Gorky retrospective

In the summer of 1948. the painter Arshile Gorky entered his studio barn in Sherman, Conn., tied a noose in a rope, chalked a farewell message on a picture crate--"Goodbye, My Loveds," it read in broken English--and hanged himself. He was 44 years old, and he had been afflicted by most of the disasters that can befall a man: cancer, the destruction of many of his works in a fire, nagging poverty and the collapse of his family. His life had been a mass of insecurities right from his childhood in Armenia, where he barely escaped a Turkish pogrom in 1915.

He was an immigrant, a nomad, a natural aristocrat condemned to anguish by his pride and fastidiousness. He was also, beyond question, one of the most gifted artists ever to work in New York, where he had landed in 1920.

Gorky's career was of inestimable significance to modern art in America. It formed a sort of Bridge of Sighs between European modernism--in particular, surrealism--and abstract expressionism.

Nearly all the artists of the New York School, beginning with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, were to some extent liberated and inspired by his example. The measure of his work can be taken from an exhibition now on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Organized by Art Historian Diane Waldman, "Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948: A Retrospective" contains some 250 paintings and drawings, and will no doubt be the definitive view of its subject for years to come.

Gorky's real name was Vosdanik Adoian. His father was a carpenter in Armenia, his mother the descendant of minor nobility and priests. He renamed himself as a defiant cosmetic gesture: "Arshile," he explained, was the Russian form of Achilles, and the writer Maxim Gorky was one of the current heroes of the Left.

(Gorky was Maxim's pseudonym too; it meant "the bitter one.") None of Arshile Gorky's friends really believed he was Russian, but the name gave him some purchase on fame. It tied up with his other harmless fibs--that he had studied under Kandinsky, for instance. Above all, it solidified the impression of a romantic outsider. Henceforth, Achilles the Bitter would be seen in New York (or so he naively hoped) as an Armenian Childe Harold, a creature of exalted but conjectural origins, with no baggage but the authority of his Europeanness, no passport but modernism itself.

As a student and then a teacher in the 1920s, Gorky was hard on himself.

At the core of his discipline lay the belief that art history was continuous, that no fundamental break had occurred between the high traditions of European classicism (exemplified by Paolo Uccello in the 15th century and Ingres in the 19th, both of whom he worshiped) and the work of the founding fathers of modernism: Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. To understand one, you had to work through the other. Gorky was under no illusions about how much time that would take; in fact, it would be almost 20 years before he found a pictorial syntax entirely his own.

In order to approach it, he simply ignored the prevailing orthodoxies of American art: regionalism and "social commitment." The patriotism of artists like Grant Wood--Arcadia with silos and furrowed hills--made little sense to this inward-facing survivor of the Turkish darkness. In a famous aside, Gorky dismissed the whole range of painting about social and political causes in the '30s as "poor art for poor people"; he had seen too much political horror as a child to imagine that canvas could interpose itself between history and its victims.

The god of Gorky's youth was Cezanne. It is interesting to see how some of the traits of his Cezannist homages recur as formal motifs, changed but still recognizable, in Gorky's mature paintings.

His liking for "involutes" of clenched form, knots of gully or tree in a frontally presented landscape a la Cezanne, remains visible in the intestinal couplings and imbrications of a painting like The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1944. A node, then space: the rhythm is of a fist opening and closing.

Two Spanish artists, Picasso and the Catalan surrealist Joan Miro, preside over his work from about 1930 onward.

After a brief cubist phase in the late '20s, Gorky had become obsessed (it is hardly too strong a word) with the sunealist promise of content in art. Surrealist metamorphosis--the sliding of identity, the merging of separate layers of experience in Picasso's threatening or rapturous eroticism of the early '30s, or in Mird's painted swarms of little Boschian monsters --was the ideal way for Gorky to convey his permeable sense of the world, drenched in childhood memory, skewed and shuffled by fantasy. "Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush," he wrote to his sister Vartoosh in 1942. "In trying to probe beyond the ordinary and the known ... I probe beyond the confines of the finite to create an infinity. Liver.

Bones. Living rocks and living plants and animals. Living dreams ... to this I owe my debt to our Armenian art. Its hybrids, its many opposites. The inventions of our folk imagination."

This strain of biological fantasy in Gorky was balanced by an intense regard for drawing in its classical sense: the precise elaboration of ideal forms. One sees its results in his self-portrait as a child, with his mother, two versions of which occupied him from 1926 to 1942. It was based on a photo of his eight-year-old self, pigeontoed, shy, holding a posy, standing beside his noble-looking mother. In the old photo, her face has a spectral pallor, like the moon, and the flowers her son grasps seem to have escaped from the rich floral embroidery on her apron. It is a strangely evocative photograph even to a complete stranger, and to Gorky it must have been unbearably poignant. In the painting, the details of pattern are suppressed for the sake of broad effects--the flat shapes of sleeve and bib, the blurred hands, the rhythmically inflected boundary line.

(They would surface later in the title of a 1944 painting, How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life.) Gorky's sense of draftsmanship was bound up, as that sense must be, in consideration of the "speed" of a line, its whip and springiness, its ability to convey an edge and the volume behind the edge. His fondness in the '30s for Picasso-like interlocks and kidney-or palette-shapes, where line served only to define closed forms, gradually gave way to a more autonomous, calligraphic sort of drawing that ushered in not only his mature work but de Kooning's as well. A small key example is Painting, 1938, with its excited rush and pressure of winglike shapes inside the pasty background field, dragged and churned but incompletely described by the brush. With this and similar paintings, Gorky arrived at the characteristic space of his mature work--a sort of cave, a blank field with intimations of depth, on which his images of organic vitality disported themselves. They were allusive, squiggly and inherently pictorial, like Miro's bugs and beasts, and they combined in irresistibly provocative ways.

One could make a small inventory of Gorky's pictorial tropes--the vulval slits and intestines and phalli, the mandibles, leaves, seeds, bracts, stamens, insect bodies, wings and so on--without touching their pictorial meanings. Gorky had a most intense and lyrical sense of natural life, expressed always as the closeup or interior view rather than the landscape with figures. Filled with a sweating, preconscious glow, a summer pullulation, images .like The Liver Is the Cock's Comb look inward to the body and not out from it. At the same time, the best Gorkys preserve a delicacy, almost a hesitancy, in their pictorial means (especially in the wayward slicing of that black line across the surface, drawn with a fitch as tremulous as a dragonfly's leg) that makes the theatricality of some of his surrealist contemporaries, like Matta, seem coarse.

Sometimes he used paint like water color, sponging and wiping it, letting it run in chancy dribbles, and anticipating in the '40s the stain techniques that later American artists (Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland) would use in the '60s. Generally, these "water color" Gorkys are the least satisfactory 5 of his canvases, congestied and irresolute. But in the fully finished canvases, like Agony or The Oriators, 1947, one sees the work of a master of surface, who had absorbed everything there was to learn from Miro's use of line, stain, scumbling and impasto and released it in a lyrical, exquisite form of visual rhetoric, where every touch answers to a specific pressure of feeling and there are no dead or incoherent patches.

Such paintings are in the minority, despite the catalogue's efforts m to present everything Gorky touched as though it were a major statement. Curator Waldman's laudable aim has been to present Gorky's career as a continuous unfolding rather than a plagiarizing apprenticeship followed by a sudden "second birth" into originality. One is grateful to see the painter whole, but one wearies of sentences like, "The drawings are superb, yet the paintings that followed ... are even more extraordinary." These canonizations of the Self-Martyred Master (an Armenian-American Van Gogh, in effect) have an anesthetic effect. One senses that Gorky's hesitations and failures were as essential to the man's identity as his real successes. Nobody could expect that in so short and racked a life, Gorky could have resolved all the tensions and contradictions of his work. But in those tensions, the existential map of abstract expressionism was drawn. --By Robert Hughes

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