Feature: Exhibition - Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Tate Modern.
Published: 18 February 2010
by JOHN EVANS
TATE Modern’s latest show is a retrospective of Arshile “I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while” Gorky.
The artist, born Vosdanig Adoian in western Armenia but having taken the name of Gorky as homage to the Russian writer, had continued: “The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finish a painting.”
So “retrospective” might not quite fit the bill with all of this exciting collection of more than 120 works, some thought to have been, in his terms, unfinished. It’s the largest Gorky collection ever brought to the UK, which chronologically examines the remarkable 25-year career of a pivotal figure who anticipated the Abstract Expressionism to emerge in 1940s New York.
“Gorky would have wanted us to stand in front of these paintings and have our breath taken away,” says show curator Matthew Gale, Tate’s head of displays.The important thing was bringing the works together again – many having not been seen in Britain before – to speak to people directly and to leave the dialogue to one side.
Certainly, with the later oils, they do have an undoubted power in the way they are made, with their colouring and in the sheer energy they display.
The irony is that it was at the time of serious critical acclaim, notably from the highly influential Clement Greenberg, that events finally took their toll and Gorky took his life, by hanging, in July 1948, aged about 45.
Greenberg was not the only admirer and, though not friends, Gale points out: “Jackson Pollock was passing by and making sure what Gorky was up to.”
What Greenberg saw was a maturity in works such as Agony and The Plow and the Song, both 1947, which marked Gorky out as internationally important. The works were beginning to attract more commercial interest, too.
Yet what also stand out, Gale says, are the “…terrible tragedies lurking in the background”. Gorky’s father left for America when he was a young child (his exact birth date is not known) and the remainder of the family fled the massacres of 1915. His mother was to starve in Russian Armenia before Gorky and his sister landed in the US in early 1920.
He reinvented himself, allowing people to think there was a real Gorky connection and claiming to have studied in Paris, though he never did so.
The exhibition examines his development from apprenticeship and the influence of Cezanne and Picasso, through hard times as a struggling art teacher in the Depression and relief through New Deal federal art projects (mainly murals now lost) for the Roosevelt administration.
It examines the impact of Cubism and the European Surrealists on his own art and how he drew on myths and memories of his childhood and homeland.
Tragedy is directly addressed in two startling versions of The Artist and His Mother, worked on in parallel and based on a 1912 photograph, the paintings being constantly worked and reworked, probably between 1926 and 1937 or even 1942. Tragedy as work in progress, indeed.
Notable, too, is the startlingly titled Portrait of Myself and My Imaginary Wife of
1933-4. Here we see two downcast heads, the male dark the female much lighter, yet far smaller, pinched and peripheral.
We move on to the breakthrough years with Gorky working in the countryside and getting to grips with the American landscape.
A hardback book Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia by Matthew Gale, £14.99, accompanies the exhibition.
• Arshile A Retrospective, Tate Modern. Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art with additional support from the Arshile Gorky Exhibition Supporters Group Tate Modern until May 3, £10 concessions. 020 7887 8888.
Pictures reproduced courtesy of The estate of Arshile Gorky ©