An artistic link between old and new

An Armenian refugee in the US, Arshile Gorky assumed a new name and taught himself to paint by imitating his heroes, but his importance lay in realising that modernity should not mean rejection of tradition, writes AIDAN DUNNE

THE MISFORTUNES heaped on Arshile Gorky in his 44 years seem too much for anyone to bear, and although it was desperately sad, one can understand his suicide, in 1948, at his home in Sherman, Connecticut. In the last two years of his life, especially, sorrows had certainly come to him, as Shakespeare put it, not as single spies but in battalions. And yet, the charming, spirited Gorky had a lot to live for. He was at the height of his abilities as an artist, and had more than begun to achieve the recognition that continued to grow after his death.

A comparison between the retrospective of his work at Tate Modern and The Real Van Goghat the Royal Academy is instructive. Van Gogh's turbulent paintings reflect his troubled inner state with a blunt directness that endears him to an empathic audience. Gorky, though beset by all manner of personal troubles, made clear-headed paintings that take a longer view, pursuing a dialogue with a classical European tradition that opened up a new world of possibilities for American art. He was hurting, but he got on with his work, which was something apart. It was a question of professional pride.

If his importance has long been recognised in the US – the retrospective, which is superb, originates in Philadelphia – he has become something of a peripheral, even forgotten figure in modern European art history. One can see why he has been consistently rated in the US, where he is rightly regarded as pivotal in New York’s usurpation of Paris as the world’s art capital, a modern classicist who engineered a link between old and new, preparing the ground and even inventing a language for near-contemporaries and a succeeding generation. In stressing his role as a transatlantic go-between, there’s a danger of overlooking his own singular achievement, and the particular value of the show at the Tate is that it allows us to look at his work in its own right.

GORKY'S MATUREpaintings and graphic work spring from a dense nutritive mix of European influences, classical and contemporary.

Largely self-taught, he didn’t disguise those influences. In fact, when working as a teacher and painter in New York, he was still learning, serving an apprenticeship in the time-honoured manner. He would square up to an artist whose work he admired and absorb their way of thinking and doing, not by just looking, or reading, but by painting. He copied paintings, and he made paintings in the manner of other artists. The first rooms in the exhibition provide a startling demonstration of this, as Gorky works his way through Cezanne, Picasso, Leger and Miró, among others, often making what come across as expert pastiches.

It was Picasso who remarked: “If it’s worth stealing, I steal it.” And Gorky methodically stole whatever was valuable, extending back to Italian Renaissance painters, to Ingres, and up to his contemporaries, notably Picasso and the surrealists. The point was not imitation, but to learn, to get somewhere else. It seems obvious, but with a premium on originality, such overt acknowledgement of influence was regarded as somehow suspect, and perhaps still is. Willem de Kooning, who befriended him, credited Gorky with allowing him to reconnect with tradition and realise that modernity should not mean rejection of the past.

Gorky was an adopted name, and to a large extent an adopted identity, an elaborate performance. His given name was Vosdanik Adoian. He was probably born in 1904 – he was vague about the year – and spent his childhood near Lake Van in the Armenian village of Khorkom, wedged between the Russian and Ottoman empires. It was a precarious and vulnerable position. Gorky’s father set off for the US around 1908, to avoid conscription into the Turkish army. Other family members followed.

When Turkey entered the first World War on the German side in 1914, its armed forces turned on the Armenian population within and without its borders, embarking on a programme of genocidal aggression. This is still a controversial subject in Turkey, as demonstrated by the recent diplomatic rift between Turkey and the US, sparked by US insistence that the systematic violence be termed a genocide.

Gorky, his younger sister and their mother, Shushan, endured siege and famine. Gorky never spoke of his experiences but his sister said he delivered ammunition to the fighters trying desperately to keep the Turkish army at bay. Eventually he, his mother and sister managed to reach Russian territory, but Shushan starved to death. She died in Gorky’s arms. Brother and sister set off on a long, difficult journey to the US, where they managed to reconnect with their extended family. Gorky settled in very well and quickly became independent.

At some stage, having been told that an Armenian refugee would not make it as a painter, he adopted his newly coined identity, presenting himself as a Russian, indeed a relation of the writer Maxim Gorky (whose name was also assumed), who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky, no less, and who had undefined aristocratic connections. Gorky translates as “bitter” and Arshile was derived from royal and mythic sources in Armenian and Russian. Gorky affected a slightly superior manner appropriate to exiled, bitter royalty. No one quite bought it, but he was by all accounts genuinely charming. Tall and dashing, there was also something slightly comic or clownish about him.

Even as he was pillaging the art of useful exemplars, he was working on a series of realist portrait images, notably one based on a photograph of himself and his mother. His later observation on painting is relevant to these provisional-looking works. It’s writ large on the wall in the Tate: “I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it’s something I never come to an end of.” The portrait studies are pointedly unfinished, their areas of blanked, obscured details suggesting the obliteration wrought by time and history.

Dwelling on the past was a vital component of his breakthrough work as well, in the form of idealised recollections of an Armenian pastoral. It’s fascinating to see it happen as you progress through the exhibition, like suddenly tuning in to a radio station. Surrealism was vital because it allowed him to deal with content in an abstract way but, rather than making pastiches or parodies of surrealist art, he’s suddenly painting Gorkys. It’s late in the day in terms of his life, at the end of the 1930s. From then on he was breaking new ground, discovering rather than appropriating.

Building up surfaces in numerous thin, soft layers, he combined luxuriantly textural painting with whiplash linear drawing (vitally, de Kooning had introduced him to the sign-painters’ liner brush). Through several wonderfully inventive series of paintings, he developed a menagerie of ambiguous biomorphic forms, endlessly suggestive of aspects of human anatomy and of animals, plants and insects, charged with cartoonish energy. These were all deployed against and emerging from a fuzzily indeterminate ground, a distinctive kind of pictorial space that was significant for many American painters. Memory and fantasy are at play in this enveloping dream-space; recollections of childhood are continuously reinvented and explored with bountiful lyricism.

THE 1940Spromised to be wonderful for Gorky. De Kooning and his partner Elaine Fried introduced him to Agnes Magruder, the daughter of a naval captain, at a party early in 1941. She was much younger than Gorky but they fell in love, she moved in with him and they married that autumn. It was a move several rungs up the social ladder that Gorky seemed to like. At the same time, he was making inroads into another elite uptown grouping, centring on the expatriate surrealist community in New York, which delighted him at first and then, belatedly, appalled him. Matta became a friend. Gorky dropped de Kooning, the person he had been closest to.

Then, from 1946, his life fell apart. A fire in his studio in January destroyed a large amount of work. He bounced back from that with admirable good grace and set about redoing what had been destroyed. Then he was diagnosed with rectal cancer and had to have a colostomy. As if that wasn’t enough, he broke his neck in a car accident, temporarily paralysing his painting arm. The flashy Matta was pursuing Agnes, and she eventually had an affair with him, later describing it as the worst thing she had ever done in her life. Gorky found out and became violent. Agnes left with their two young daughters. Within days, Gorky killed himself.

Numerous accounts attest that he was utterly devoted to painting. Through years of relative poverty, he lavished money on materials at the expense of basic comforts. He was technically fastidious to the extent that the boorish Pollock mocked him for the delicacy of his painting. There is a delicacy to his work, a precision of colour, tone and line that gives it a classical poise.

Many years after Gorky’s death, in an interview with David Sylvester, de Kooning mentioned that he himself had been through rigorous academic training in Europe, as Gorky had not: “He came from no place. And for some mysterious reason, he knew lots more about painting, and art – he just knew it by nature – things I was supposed to know and feel and understand – he really did it better.”

Arshile Gorky – A Retrospective. Tate Modern, Bankside, London. See tate.org.uk. Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm, Fri-Sat 10am-10pm. Until May 3