Gorky retrospective at Art Museum (4th review)

You really can't miss the main attraction of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's fall season, where a giant dangling banner from the museum's pillared front proclaims, simply, GORKY, with each letter broken out by itself. The 99 names of God couldn't get bigger billing.

Speaking of names, the Armenian painter Vosdanig Adoian wasn't born Arshile Gorky at all. He assumed the last name of Maxim Gorky, ostensibly in tribute to the latter's espousal of the Armenian cause. That was fair enough, but when the artist began to claim an actual blood tie to Gorky, he crossed that bright red line between homage and appropriation.

There is no doubt that young Vosdanig suffered greatly in the Armenian genocide of World War I, and that he indeed did lose his mother before emigrating with his sister to the U.S. He seems to have permitted various legends to accrue about his actual experience, though, and he suffered, perhaps, somewhat too publicly.

I'm not thinking of the two versions of his The Artist and His Mother, the obsessive reworkings of a childhood photograph that occupied him, off and on, for some 15 years (these actually display a fine restraint, although their now-iconic status, sentimentalized by decades of greeting card-style reproduction, overrates their importance as works of art). No, I'm thinking of the 1934 Self-Portrait with an Imaginary Wife. Couldn't the guy just have put an advertisement in the lonely-hearts column?

Genuine disaster

Gorky had just attained a measure of serious recognition— André Breton hailed him as the Surrealist painter, which must have left Dali and Max Ernst in a snit— when disaster truly overtook him. His studio burned down; he developed rectal cancer; he was seriously injured in a car crash; and the wife he'd finally married, Agnes Magruder, ran off with a close friend, the Chilean painter Roberto Matta. In July 1948 Gorky committed suicide, thereby charting the path Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko would follow, but also sealing his legend as the suffering saint of Abstract Expressionism.

Disentangling this story line from Gorky's actual artistic achievement is a task, but the blockbuster exhibit at the Art Museum is more interested in exploiting it. The various rooms of the Dorrance Gallery, several of which concentrate on the preliminary sketches of paintings crucial to Gorky's career, are dubbed "creation chambers," as if to suggest a holy genesis.

Gorky did do a lot of preparatory work for his paintings, which is of scholarly and sometimes artistic interest, but the payoff in the finished canvases isn't always commensurate with the effort. For the rest, the layout is conventionally chronological, taking us from the earliest work to the unfinished Green Painting, the work on his easel when he took his own life.

Learning from Cézanne

What we discover is not unfamiliar, but heaped on in spades. Gorky was an autodidact who worked through the styles of the major figures of modern art, beginning with Cézanne. In this respect he was not alone; most of the Abstract Expressionists served their apprenticeship to the European masters, a point made in the Art Museum's "Cézanne and Beyond" show last year. But I know of no more risible work in the history of art than Gorky's Staten Island (1927)— a work recycled from the Cézanne exhibit—which makes the outer New York borough look exactly like Provence.

What followed Gorky's Cézanne period were plentiful helpings of Picasso, Leger and Miro. In the mid-1930s Gorky followed Stuart Davis and other federally-funded muralists in a style that might be called American Constructivism, which culminated in Organization, a moderately interesting painting here offered as a masterpiece, and the murals done for Newark Airport, only two of which— rescued from oblivion in the 1970s— survive.

Debt to Picasso

Some of Gorky's Picasso-inspired work of the late 1930s isn't half bad, although of course derivative. The exception is the remarkable suite of 86 graphic works, mostly done in ink, for the two painted versions of Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia (1932-34). The paintings themselves, which hang at opposite ends of one of the gallery rooms, are disappointing and negligible, but the drawings, ten of which are on display between them, are another matter. Some of them are obvious knockoffs of De Chirico, whose work was the point of departure for the paintings; but others, indebted to Picasso but strikingly original in their juxtaposition of elements and their intensely nocturnal character, are extraordinary.

The Nighttime series as a whole, never I believe yet shown in its entirety, is a major achievement of 20th-Century graphic art. Gorky could always draw like an angel, and in some of his last works the boundary between painting and drawing is indistinct. The best of the Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia studies are wholly in black and white, and they achieve a psychological penetration and suggestiveness that eluded Gorky in all but a handful of the mature paintings on which his reputation principally rests.

An abstract masterpiece

The critical consensus is that Gorky's major work was done in the last few years of his life, beginning with the several versions of Garden in Sochi. There is a lyric playfulness to the Sochi works, indebted as they remain to Miro. It was Matta, however, who persuaded Gorky to experiment with the biomorphic forms that became the basis of his signature style, and that seem to have interacted with his experience of the Virginia countryside, where his wife's family had a farm. In The Liver Is the Cock's Comb (1944), Diary of a Seducer (1945), Water of the Flowery Mill (1945), Betrothal II (1947) and Agony (1947), all in the present show, Gorky produced a powerful synthesis of form and color that at last transcended influences. Agony, in particular, although a work of relatively modest scale, belongs on a short list of Abstract Expressionist masterpieces.

At the same time, however, Gorky's output remained uneven, and to give even the foggiest sketches the masterpiece treatment, as curator Michael Taylor does, only feeds the Gorky myth. The truth is that Gorky's biomorphism was very much hit or miss, and his vocabulary tended to be repetitive. The increasingly grandiose titles he gave his works— The Unattainable, The Limit, Summation— suggest a genius at the end of his tether, driven toward a catastrophic sublime.

A Barnes preview?

But Gorky's gift was more modest, and to inflate it, as a show like this does— 178 works!— is rather to obscure than to reveal his genuine value. That's the way of it, though, these days. Major art exhibitions, like big studio movies, cost money, and they must be hyped to recoup their investment and turn the profit their corporate sponsors require.

A show like "Gorky"— by no means the worst of its type— illustrates the fate worse than death being planned for the Barnes collection in its coffin on the Parkway. Albert Barnes chose his paintings not for their status as masterpieces, but for their inherent quality, and he arranged them not merely to be admired individually but to be seen in context. Not everything he bought was (or needed to be) a masterpiece, but the whole collection is now to be stamped with that label, and to get the reverential (and revenue-producing) Gorky treatment.

This is the exact reverse of art education, not to mention simply intelligent, discriminating art viewing. It is art reduced to a buck. Since I don't know anyone who owns a Gorky (or a Cézanne), I'm dependent on museums for the opportunity to see them. The dollar signs that more and more obscure them make them increasingly harder to view, though.♦


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