Art Review : ‘Betrothals’: How Gorky Bridged Gap

Arshile Gorky occupied an awkward but heroic slot in the development of contemporary American art. His historical job was to bridge the gap between two opposing conceptions of the landscape of the subconscious. Now we can see how he pulled it off in a fascinating small didactic show at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Titled “Gorky’s Betrothals” it was organized in tandem by curators Paul Schimmel at MOCA and Klaus Kertess at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a rare colloquium of three versions of Gorky’s pivotal late painting of 1947 “Betrothal.” Shown along with eight studies, they provide an illuminating look at how the artist combined academic methodology with irrational inspiration.

Born Vosdanik Adoian in Armenia in 1904, Gorky emigrated to the U.S. in 1920. Since all he wanted from life was to be a great artist, he took a pseudonym and gave interviews posing as a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (itself a pseudonym.) Pennilessness was the standard condition for advanced artists of Gorky’s generation, but 20 years of ferociously concentrated work did gain him the cognoscenti’s critical admiration. The fates were less kind. In 1946 his studio burned, destroying 27 paintings. In 1948 an auto accident broke his neck and immobilized his painting arm. Shortly, his wife left taking both children. A month later Gorky hanged himself after writing, “Goodbye My Loveds” on a wooden picture crate in white chalk.

Gorky’s character imbued his art with an agonized sense of romantic melancholy. These 11 examples show that he was a slow and systematic worker who lingered like a languorous lover unwilling to part from the beloved until achieving perfect satiation. He wanted the end result to look mysteriously spontaneous. Twenty years ago it did, but time can do funny things to perception.

Working like Ingres, the great French academician whom he admired, Gorky did numerous preparatory drawing studies, laying out general ideas in progressively more detail until he tacked down composition and expression. (One early version includes a graphic pair of female breasts that are more oblique in finished results.) Finally he gridded a study for enlargement, then executed it on canvas to see how it looked at full scale.

In a way, Gorky’s larger formula was simple. European Cubism had tended to flatten form and space. Picasso’s style evolved this way, as did Miro’s abstract surrealism. Its biomorphic shapes suggested all manner of viscera, but they were executed more or less like paper cutouts. Gorky’s aim was, in a sense, more realistic. He wanted to express the tangibility of wet forms in softly atmospheric surroundings.

The recently discovered version of “Betrothal” belonging to Yale University has a lovely pensive, gray liquidity that treats oil like watercolor. Like the rest, it is made up of ambiguous forms suggesting things from bulbous mushrooms to delicate music stands to the vagina dentata. MOCA’s “Betrothal I” sets a palette of delicately nuanced earth tones drifting foggily around blue-gray entities. The Whitney’s “Betrothal II” is more filled-in, almost sculptural and noticeably more polished.

Today the work looks over-calculated and a little oily in its desire to please. Popular culture has long since taken over Gorky’s actors and turned them into progressively more cuddly science-fiction monsters so his works now hint of kitsch.

These are things one notices rather than things that wreck the work. They are signs that Gorky’s pictorial language is not spoken that way any longer, it has entered the realm of stylization. When that happens there is a perceptual speed bump. It will smooth out over time until Gorky is no harder to read than Ingres or Henry James.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. to June 19, closed Mondays, (213) 626-6222.