Arshile Gorky retrospective showcases master’s many styles

by Shant Shahrigian

Published: Tuesday January 05, 2010

Arshile Gorky, "Abstraction with a Palette.". 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Philadelphia - There are many ways to take in the sweeping retrospective of Arshile Gorky’s work currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

The series of drawings and paintings from the early 1920s to 1948 provide a crash course in modern art, with works that exemplify the principles of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, along with less easily named styles. 

The exhibit also presents an intriguing biography of Gorky, who after making several early self-portraits inserted provocative hints of the creator’s hand throughout his later, highly abstract work. 

To give just one more approach, Gorky’s drawings and paintings can be taken as a universe of complex, churning feelings, often painful ones: the artist was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has given his work the space and prominence customarily reserved for the artistic greats. With a recent trio of biographies and the 2002 film Ararat dedicated to Gorky, his name may well join the list of household names in 20th-century art.

Paying homage, then, to Gorky’s future, a word about his tumultuous life: he arrived in the United States with his sister in 1920 to join their father after fleeing the massacres at his village on Lake Van and his mother’s death from starvation.

As he studied in Boston, taught himself painting in New York City and mastered the avant-garde styles of the day, Gorky (né Vosdanig Manoog Adoyan, around 1904) joined the company of Willem de Kooning, André Breton, and other now-celebrated misfits. 

Since 1941, Gorky and his family intermittently stayed in rural Virginia and Connecticut. In 1948, weeks after an automobile accident immobilized his painting arm, Gorky committed suicide by hanging himself. 

Dizzying multitude of styles 

Gorky’s mother is the main subject of several of his paintings. She takes her most recognizable form in the large-scale Artist and His Mother, Gorky’s two versions of which have been united to enlightening effect for the Philadelphia retrospective. 

Gorky thickly painted both works in subdued pastel colors that give the subjects’ unemotive faces an enigmatic quality. In the earlier version, the mother’s placid expression evokes a Byzantine Madonna, but in the later painting her lips minutely part as though betraying a repressed gasp. The paintings thus complement each other to suggest the subtle range of emotions Gorky felt about this subject.

During the long stretches he worked on The Artist and His Mother (version one: 1926–36; version two: about 1929–42), Gorky went through several phases in his other works. 

His devoted study of Paul Cézanne yielded the arresting paintings, like Staten Island (1927) made to look like a southern French countryside, that start the exhibit off. 

But one could argue Gorky emerged as an original artist during his Cubist stage. His Abstraction with a Palette (1930–31) provides a fascinating glimpse into the act of making art, while the two murals that survive from a 1936 commission for Newark Airport vaunt modern technology on massive, abstract backgrounds.

The influence of Gorky’s childhood suffering is present in all his paintings, but it is most prominent in Enigmatic Combat (1936–37).  Distended tent-shaped figures and contorted, colorful ovals depict a scene of acute pain. 

As in Pablo Picasso’s contemporaneous La Guernica, individual perpetrators are obscured in our view of the violence, contributing to the universality of the work.

The dozens of Surrealist paintings Gorky produced in the 1940s are among his most provocative works. 

The explosive The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) is a visceral response to the outdoors. What look like beaks, claws, and eviscerated entrails stretch across a wide canvas filled with hazy, bright colors. As in Gorky’s Untitled Virginia Landscapes painted around the same time, one keenly perceives the countryside – but one where Charles Ives provides the soundtrack. 

Coherence from abstraction

The last styles Gorky employed are notoriously obscure.  But if we play with the blanket word, “abstract,” used to describe his output, details of his paintings can emerge and his works come into focus as coherent wholes. 

Sometimes, Gorky is painting abstract-ions, or unnamable things like moods that have no recognizable shape in day-to-day life.  Other times Gorky is abstract-ing, or depicting nameable things like body parts and furniture as almost unrecognizable shapes.