InternationalFive clues to Arshile Gorky’s work
by Gregory Lima
Published: Thursday October 01, 2009 in Cafesjian Center for the Arts
Untitled (to Andre Breton), 1945, black, yellow, red ink and tempera on paper, 36 x 26 cm. This is a mature surrealist work of Gorky at the height of his power in the mid-1940s. It is a tribute to Andre Breton, the intellectual father of surrealism, who had become his close friend and who hailed Gorky as the most important American artist of the time. Arshile Gorky / Gerard L. Cafesjian Collection
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Yerevan - In the 1920s in Yerevan and New York major new art museums were created. In Yerevan, Martiros Saryan was establishing the National Gallery, while in New York Alfred Barr was preparing MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.
A major art museum is an expensive judgment on what passes as worth gathering and saving.
Each in its time required an explanatory narrative to justify its acquisitions. Periodically each narrative requires renewed scrutiny in the light of new developments, expanded horizons, and reevaluations. We are in such a period today in Yerevan.
Both Yerevan and New York had to answer the question: What is significant modern art?
Strangely, perhaps, the question at that time was much more difficult to answer in New York than in Yerevan. At the turn of the century and into the early 1920s, as far as the art scene was concerned, Moscow was a suburb of the Parisian avant garde, often outdoing Paris.
Major Armenian artists of the period studied in Moscow, Paris, or both, and were generally open, within their own perspectives, to the latest "advances."
I grew up as a schoolboy in Arshile Gorky's New York of the 1930s and early 1940s, where I haunted the museums and galleries. In that atmosphere of economic depression, Gorky's Parisian-inspired outlook on modern art was an especially hard sell. Personally, I didn't understand the formative work he and the small number of artists attached to the American modern-art avant garde were doing.
The meaning is in the movement
One day, at one of the New York museums, I watched a very tall man intently staring at a painting on the wall. As I watched him, for the longest time his eyes would not break from the scene before him. For some reason it made me uncomfortable. Deliberately, I walked between him and the wall, breaking his contact.
He turned on me, angry. "It is paint," I said, defensively. "It is not moving."
"It is a Cezanne!" he answered the rude boy. "The meaning is in the movement."
I believe the tall man with strong, unblinking eyes focused on the painting before him was Arshile Gorky. It was the best introduction to modern art this critic was ever to receive.
What Cezanne brought to modern art was the fusion of time and motion into painting, as the artist experienced it, and he did it in the most innocent of all possible ways. He did it by painting in his own style exactly what he saw, as he saw it. But his painting was not a quick sketch executed in the moment. When he stood up and stretched and then returned to the scene before him, even though he tried to place himself exactly where he was, the scene had changed, subtly or seriously. The change was in the light, the color, or perhaps a slight altering of where he was sitting. It was the same, but different in a visible way against what he had already painted. Instead of erasing, altering, or ignoring what he had done before, he learned to deliberately include it. How he did this with his brush and colors made all the difference. In this simple act he revolutionized modern art.
It depended on the artists who would follow him and how they interpreted the innovation. At its simplest, it visibly extended the plane of a color. Abstract the planes and you come to Cubism, as with Picasso. But that was only one of multiple possibilities of new artistic systems with the artist rather than the subject at the center of the work, all of which may not yet have been explored. At its heart lay the importance of the artist's released creativity in shaping his vision, his intention, and the hinted possibility of conjoining multiple perspectives in a single composition.
America looks to Europe
The effect on modern art, including early-20th-century Russian art, was so profound that Lenin, on the advice of his minister of culture, was prepared (until the money too soon ran out) to erect a statue of Cezanne in a Moscow square, to celebrate him as one of the major revolutionaries of the times.
If Cezanne found favor among the revolutionaries in Russia, who spoke for the disenfranchised, it was an entirely different matter in America. The French avant garde, with their international influence, had a certain snob appeal in America, and was largely the province of the highly educated. Alfred Barr, establishing the Museum of Modern Art, was a product of Princeton, with a Harvard Ph.D. The collectors who depended on his educated eye began by looking to Europe, offering little support for the few local aspirants. That support had to come from a scant number of collectors, and strangely for the United States, from the government. In the first six years of its existence, from 1929 to 1935, MoMA spent no more than $1,000 on new acquisitions.
That Gorky was included in the first group exhibit at the MoMA in 1930 was a notable achievement, and it established him as a serious artist. By that time he was about 26 years old and had transformed himself from Manoog Adoian - the boy with the donkey in the Yerevan market trying to sell to other starving Genocide refugees the gleanings from the fields that his sisters had gathered after others had harvested the crops.
He was to become one of the four pillars of Armenian modern art, standing with Martiros Saryan, Hakob Hakobyan, and Ervand Kochar. Of the four, to my mind, he is the least understood, cut off by tragedy at the moment he had finally achieved the breakthrough into a wholly original style of international importance.
Transferring the capital of modern art
Over a period of some two decades from that first exhibition at the MoMA, he was a leader among a small group of a new wave that would sweep the art world, transferring the capital of modern art from Paris to New York.
It is not strange that recently in Paris, at the prestigious Pompidou, a new series of exhibitions, showing the development of modern art from the mid-20th century, started by giving over the whole designated space for the exhibition to Arshile Gorky as the beginning of the contemporary movement of which New York is the capital. The recognition of his stature in Paris, and in contemporary art, would have made him proud.
