Gorky retrospective at Art Museum (2nd review)

Arshile Gorky can be a little hard to pin down. Is he a skilled copyist of modern masters like Cézanne and Picasso? The painter of iconic mother portraits with chalky melancholy figures? Or the wild abstractionist of bold free lines, riotous colors and strange titles?

The answer, of course, is all of the above, as the Art Museum's current Gorky retrospective convincingly demonstrates.

Like most retrospectives, the exhibition is chronological, enabling viewers to understand and experience Gorky's art in relation to what was happening to him in his life, from its tragic beginning with the horrors of the Armenian genocide to his tragic suicide following illness and a disastrous studio fire. Until that moment Gorky was a survivor of the first order, and it makes for a fascinating story.

Technical skill

He was also an artist of intelligence and invention, whose virtuosic copies of artists he considered his teachers are astonishing in their fidelity to style and spirit. Exceptional drawing and composition skills inform the whole of his work; as curator Michael Taylor remarks on the Art Museum's audio tour, Gorky possessed an "intuitive, precise technical knowledge of how paintings are created."

Gorky's other foundation is his past. Memories of his childhood pass in and out of his work in various ways, but nowhere are they shown more directly than in the two paintings of himself as a boy standing next to the mother, who died in his arms.

About mid-point in the show you encounter Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, a series of black-and-white drawings from a two-year period when Gorky couldn't afford to buy paint. Not only are these works a high point of the exhibit for their endless combinations of line, value, form, and vigorous composition, but they are also a testament to Gorky's survivor spirit. He moved back to color and painting in the 1930s when he was hired by the federal government's Works Progress Administration to create murals for Newark Airport; the murals are interesting to see, but the story about them more so.

When it all came together

It's in the following years, in the 1940s, when it all comes together for Gorky. Colorful, energetic abstract compositions seem to burst forth from him in unchecked profusion during this period. Here Gorky's relationships with nature and with his beloved wife and children are mixed in a glorious stew with recollections of an unspoiled homeland.

In part through the inspiration of his friend, the Surrealist Matta, Gorky's style becomes looser, with thin, runny paints, more intense color, and great freedom of shape and line. The room with these works is almost too small to hold the exuberance. Of the several recognized masterpieces present, The Liver is the Cock's Comb is a particularly rich feast.

Even after the studio fire, and the loss of his health and ultimately his family, Gorky hangs on to his spirit as long as he can. For his final series, a set of delicate, sensitive paintings titled "Charred Beloved," he pays strikingly poignant testimony to the smoke and flame that took so much from him.

This is a rich exhibition and a good opportunity to get to know an artist whose work is rarely seen in such quantity and depth.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.