Arshile Gorky: Tragedy and Tribute (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Arshile Gorky's life story reads like a hack screenplay about a tortured artist. First, the upswing: the Armenian family forced into exile by genocide, the immigration to America, the talented artist's first successes (exhibits, teaching, society of other famous artists), early loves. Then the inevitable downswing: destruction of work in a fire, sickness, both mental (depression) and physical (cancer), marriage and family but then betrayal, a last precious period of creative flowering but then a car accident, relapse into further depression, and suicide. Regarding the suicide, what, my companions at the exhibit asked, took him so long? So much sorrow in one life hardly seems possible, or perhaps seems cartoonish. The Gorky Retrospective now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art does much to minimize this melodrama, bringing into vivid relief the formidable talent and artistic vision, as well as the soulfulness, underlying his work.

The deeper understanding enabled by this exhibit, a fairly comprehensive collection of paintings and drawings, first becomes apparent when you encounter the hushed cluster of viewers in front of Gorky's well-known charcoal portrait of his mother, Shushan (lent very reluctantly, apparently, by the Art Institute of Chicago). Gorky made the drawing from a photo of his mother that he appropriated from his father some six years after his arrival in America, seven years after her death. Truly, this portrait has attained iconic status. On one level, there is the mere beauty of the draftsmanship, with its off center face, slightly to the upper left, the delicately rendered hooded eyes and pensive mouth. Although terrible, the details behind Shushan's untimely death by starvation -- caused by the Turkish blockade of food to Armenians forceably relocated to eastern Turkey after World War I -- seem less important than the stoic pain of her gaze, the universal look of the exile. Any child or grandchild of an immigrant can recognize the look in their own family pictures. This melancholy pervades all of Gorky's work, and is the unifying factor throughout his serial stylistic metamorphoses from Cezanne devotee to Cubist and biomorphic surrealist to abstract expressionist.

Gorky's early work mostly demonstrates an enormous innate talent and impressive capacity to absorb and learn from other artists. His versions of Cezanne can be as structurally poetic as Cezanne, his Cubist compositions often as powerful as Picasso and Braque's. Somewhere during this process of appropriation, however, we see Gorky begin to develop his own distinctive vision. In "Woman with a Palette" (1927), for instance, the classical Picassoid figure of a woman seems endowed with a distinctly un-Picassoid darkness, the eyes shadowed, the hands claw-like or hidden. "Harmony" (1931) and "Still Life" (1930-31) likewise are less facile than other Cubists, more thickly painted, more deliberate, with more scraping, hiding and revealing of layers of paint. Gorky's skill with pentimenti, incorporating the shadows of earlier painterly attempts, is demonstrated perhaps most beautifully in "Blue Figure in a Chair" (1931), where one can see quotes of both Picasso and Matisse but the painterly result, with its hide-and-seek scrapings, remains unmistakeably Gorky.

Gorky's drawings, of which there are many fine examples in the exhibit, parallel his painterly development, i.e., somewhat derivative in the early phases, but ultimately showcasing his spectacular skill with line. While perhaps less emotionally resonant than the portrait of his mother, his line drawings of Leonore Portnoff (1938-40), for example, demonstrate his unique delicate sensibility. The cubist drawings, usually done in pen and ink and graphite, such as the "Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia" series (1931-1932) similarly show off his virtuosity, but in this case in terms of strong compositions of value.

The obvious influence of other artists on Gorky during his WPA period, such as Stuart Davis, for example, seem to bear less fruit than the earlier phase. While undoubtedly competent, the content orientation of them, especially in the studies for a proposed mural for the Aviation Building at the New York World's Fair (1938-39), have little of the soulfulness that give Gorky's other paintings such depth and complexity. In the 1940's, we see the influence of Joan Miro on Gorky to better effect; the two clearly share a compatible metaphysical sensibility which seems to expand rather than contract Gorky's distinctive vision of the world.

By the mid 1940's, we are seeing Gorky as we know him today, with his elegant biomorphic shapes and melting colors, and with his trademark painterly exultations and laments. Here the exhibit lays out for the viewer Gorky's abstract interpretations of the joys of marriage and fatherhood and the tragedies of illness and depression in equal measure. His painterly line attains its greatest expressiveness, as in "How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life" (1944) and "Love of the New Gun" (1944). And during this time, the compositions of soft blobs of color and drips, interspersed with masterly drawn lines, begin to attain the exciting complexity of symphonies, as in "Good Afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln" (1944) and "Diary of a Seducer" (1945).

The last phase of Gorky's work is perhaps the hardest to see in the exhibit; beautiful as they are, they clearly reflect the personal pain of his life, physically and emotionally. While there are also some softly nostalgic works in this period, such as "The Plow and the Song" series (1946-7), the drawings and paintings in the "Agony" series (1946-7) have a barely contained intensity of mark and color that can be both visceral and transcendant. The colors, with browns and reds, seem to suggest flaming bowels, as in"Agony" 1947 (Gorky was then suffering from rectal cancer), and yet the chalky whites and murky blacks of the "Beloved" and "Charred Beloved " series (1946) also bring to mind prayers and meditation. These works are strangely evocative of the pre-Renaissance depictions of the martyrs, both bloody and heavenly, earthly and otherwordly at the same time. Gorky's drawings, "Summation" (1946) and "The Orators" (1946-7) for instance, look almost Boschean, with the furious scribblings seeming to depict some kind of hellish landscape, chaotic and yet contained by the artist's masterful composition.

The softly daubed brushwork of Gorky's last few paintings ("Dark Green Painting" 1948, "The Limit," 1947, "Untitled," 1943-48) have a tentativeness and hesitancy to them that is oddly unlike his previous works. "Untitled," for example, with its hatching strokes and pastel palette, could almost be mistaken for the fuzzy, early Abstract Expressionist phase of Philip Guston. The tonal shift of these works is strangely poignant, and seems perhaps like Gorky's final attempt at metamorphosis, but into what? The question of course remains unanswered.

Gorky has often been called a "Painter's Painter," which suggests both an intimacy with the medium and with his artistic precedents. Indeed, Robert Storr's contention that "Gorky never tried to kill his artistic fathers" is evident throughout this exhibit; every appropriation on view, rather, seems like the tribute of a loving son, one who was driven to memorialize the art and relationships that he held sacred. Unlike Picasso, the Ur Creator of the 20th Century, Gorky did not chew up and spit out his influences as new matter, but rather internalized and gently transformed them. If this lessens his status as a groundbreaker in painting, or takes the edge off "the new" in his oeuvre, it does not diminish his great talent. Innovation, so highly valued in modernism, takes a back seat in this retrospective. The melancholy and elegaic quality of Gorky's work, his art's constant and valiant attempt to capture what was lost, perhaps only demonstrates that this kind of invention was actually never his primary artistic goal.