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Garden in Sochi, 1941, by Arshile Gorky
Detail from Garden in Sochi (1941) by Arshile Gorky. Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London/Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Detail from Garden in Sochi (1941) by Arshile Gorky. Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London/Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

The mysterious art of Arshile Gorky

This article is more than 14 years old
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver

Jackson Pollock was ­carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?

Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to ­Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."

In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.

He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car ­accident.

Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war ­vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.

As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.

He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.

Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a ­doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.

Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with ­tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.

In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.

Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, ­triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."

Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching ­camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.

Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.

"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.

"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.

Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient ­Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."

"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal ­reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be ­doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."

More on this story

More on this story

  • Arshile Gorky: art, life and legend at Tate Modern

  • Arshile Gorky at Tate Modern: monsters, myths and memories

  • Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

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