Inside the tortured mind of a modern art revolutionary

The world of the Modernist artist in America in the 1930s and ‘40s had the two-tiered structure of the universe according to Plato. The bright upper tier was Paris, where “real” art was being made, and the lower tier -- the cave -- was America, which learned about the real world mainly through grainy black-and-white reproductions in periodicals such as Cahiers d’Art. Venues for real art were sparse: the Gallatin Collection at New York University, known as the Museum of Living Art, and the not entirely satisfactory collection at the Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929. It was only on the basis of infrequent periodicals that American artists could form some sense of what was happening in art, even if they had to guess what the paintings looked like in full color. These committed Modernists lived by the aesthetic imperatives of the School of Paris until the New York School became a reality in the early 1950s.

It is ironic that almost the first painter to have broken into the new aesthetic should have been Arshile Gorky, who so identified himself with the School of Paris that he was widely dismissed by critics and colleagues as a hopelessly unoriginal figure in the New York art scene -- a “blatant imitator,” as the unforgiving critic Emily Genauer wrote after his death in 1951. Alfred H. Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, commented on Gorky’s dependence on European style during the Depression, but “[i]n spite of his derivative style one felt grateful for his studies of abstract and semi-abstract painting during a decade given over largely to Social Realism and the American scene.”

As late as 1943, art dealer Samuel Kootz wrote about him with a kind of despairing admiration: “Gorky has genuine talent; he is definitely intelligent about his art, his painting is superb, and he has great sensibility. But somehow he has never jelled those talents, at one moment pursuing Cezanne, at another hot footing after Picasso or Miro or Leger. He has been too busy to become Gorky.” Something was felt to be missing. Hayden Herrera’s book is the fascinating story of how Gorky overcame his influences and became an artist of singular originality and beauty.

The characteristic biography of the Abstract Expressionist painter pivots around the moment when he -- and it was a movement dominated by men -- broke through a barrier that became visible only when it was shattered and became possessed of a stunningly novel style. None seemed more than modestly talented until the moment Jackson Pollock began to drip paint onto canvases on the floor, or Willem De Kooning to slather strokes with wide brushes across surfaces, or Mark Rothko to float dilating rectangles on fields of color, or Franz Kline to lay heavy black strokes across white spaces, or Barnett Newman, using masking tape, to segment his surfaces with wavering vertical bars he was to call “zips.” Gorky was more accomplished than any of them, in part because of his prolonged discipleship. Sadly, the fact that he had done something extraordinary was hardly visible to those who had formed their image of Gorky as an emulative artist with nothing of his own to say. To them, he seemed a mere footnote to Modernism.

In the summer of 1943, while painting outdoors on a farm that belonged to his in-laws, Gorky produced a drawing that looked different from anything he had done before. When he showed it to his wife, Agnes, whom he fondly called “Mougouch.” He asked, “Will anybody understand this? What do you think it is? Do you think I’m mad? Does it look like a drawing to you?” (I have read of a comparable moment that took place when Pollock showed his wife, Lee Krasner, the first of his so-called drip paintings and asked whether it was really painting, and they walked back to their house, arms over one another’s shoulders.)

It would be harder to see that a new era had begun, that he had broken through to a vision peculiarly his. While critic Clement Greenberg was able to say that Gorky’s 1947 “The Calendars” was the best painting in that year’s Whitney Annual and “one of the best pictures ever done by an American,” not every critic was as farsighted as he and able to discern at that early date what was to happen in American painting over the next decade. The concluding irony of Gorky’s achievement is that someone so narrowly identified with French artistic values should have been so instrumental in New York’s eclipse of the School of Paris.

Breakthroughs are difficult to explain. To this day no one quite understands what made Pollock revolutionize the technique of painting. As for Gorky, perhaps we can find a key in a letter that Mougouch wrote. “The country was a great inspiration to Gorky. He was again a small child, not having been to the country for any length of time since he was 6 years old .... He was able to discover himself and what he has done is to create a world of his own but a world equal to nature.” What she did not know, because Gorky kept his real past hidden, was that his childhood was spent in Armenia, near Lake Van. His wife discovered a decade after his death that his real name was Vosdanig Adoian. “Gorky” was a part of a myth he created. He claimed to be Russian, to have grown up in the Caucasus, kin to famous writer Maxim Gorky. He had lived through the Armenian genocide and experienced the death of his beloved mother. But despite the horrors he witnessed, he saw his early childhood in idyllic terms, and there must have been some deep resonance between the landscape of Virginia and Armenia as he had experienced it.

Robert Motherwell invoked the Surrealist idea of “the original creative principle” in accounting for Gorky’s change. In particular, Motherwell claimed, it was through Surrealists -- and above all Roberto Matta -- that Gorky shifted from “copying Cahiers d’art to a full-blown development of his own.” But that development took place, as Mougouch recognized, among the grass and weeds of a natural setting. There is no underestimating the role Matta played in redirecting many future Abstract Expressionists, including Motherwell and Pollock. He taught them spontaneity. He persuaded Gorky to thin his pigment with turpentine and to loosen his brushwork. Gorky deployed brilliant biomorphic forms in shallow spaces, like visionary gardens, and gave them poetic rather than literal titles.

Herrera is Mougouch’s goddaughter and has been able to use Mougouch’s letters and diaries to help tell the story in “Arshile Gorky.” Mougouch is a wonderfully vivid writer and a spirited and intelligent woman, younger than her husband by 20 years. There was great love on both sides, and I have no reason to question Herrera’s claim that it was not just the sojourn in the country and the nudging of Matta in 1942 that moved Gorky to apply paint to canvas with a greater confidence. The change in Gorky’s work came also from his contentment and security in his marriage. His love for Mougouch, his anticipation of fatherhood, and his delight in her appreciation of his work freed his hand and heart.

Love, memory and a new philosophy of paint reconfigured what Gorky had internalized because of his “chronic diffidence in the face of Parisian art,” to produce a body of strikingly original works that at the same time looked familiarly Modernist.

In the last few years of Gorky’s life, he underwent a series of personal catastrophes. Until this cascade of disasters, it can be said that, despite the horrors he had experienced during his Armenian childhood, he was a fairly happy man. He was tall and slender, with dark good looks, and deeply attractive to women. People found him charming and charismatic. He was poor, but that was a condition he shared with most artists and indeed most Americans in the Depression. He had an expansive personality with engaging mannerisms. What happened to him came from outside and was mostly a matter of undeserved bad luck.

In 1946, a Connecticut barn that Gorky used as his studio went up in flames, destroying much of his work. Initially Gorky felt somewhat liberated. “It’s all right,” he told Mougouch. “I’ve got it all inside me. I can go on painting.” Indeed he could and did. But a few months after the fire, he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and underwent a colostomy. This left him with an abiding fear of recurrence, but the psychological damage was far greater than that. “His manhood was so terribly assaulted by the operation,” Mougouch wrote, “and his jealous temperament became intolerable.” Gorky’s mood from this point on was increasingly volatile. And painting, though always a charged activity for him, took on a special urgency, because it was the only thing that gave him relief and brought tranquillity to his household.

Mougouch tried to be the perfect artist’s wife, but their relations were increasingly strained. Then in 1948, the painting ran dry. Their relationship became hellish. In June, Mougouch bolted, to spend two days with Matta. “It was perhaps the worse thing I ever did, but I did it. The affair with Matta ruined my life in one zip.” The streak of bad luck did not end there. A few days later, Gorky visited his dealer, Julian Levy, who drove him home afterward. There was an accident, in which Gorky’s neck was broken. He lost the use of his right arm. It was as if the power to make art and the power to make love had abandoned him at once. Gorky had reached the limits of self-control. On July 21, he hanged himself. He chalked “Goodbye all my loved” on a wooden box. He was 45, but no one is entirely certain when in fact he was born. He gave his birth date as Oct. 25 -- “No doubt,” Herrera writes “because that is Picasso’s birthday.”

Had it not been for the accident, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the dry streak would have ended, with Gorky finding it possible to paint again. Whether the marriage could have survived the infidelity is hard to say, given Gorky’s jealous nature and his views on the duties of a wife. His work might have deepened, might have become more beautiful through the ‘50s, but breakthroughs generally come one to a lifetime, if they come at all. Gorky was immensely encouraged by his reception from the Surrealists, especially Breton, but Surrealism began to cloy after the war, and Gorky’s work still awaits criticism -- Greenberg’s words notwithstanding -- that will give it new life.

As for the life, it is hard to imagine that Herrera’s study will soon be superseded. I don’t suppose Mougouch, as she continues to call herself -- almost certainly in tribute to her gifted and tortured husband -- will write a book, but her side of things will now always be available, and I for one am glad to have gotten to know her through her wonderful letters and memoirs. To have had a wife like her, Gorky was a lucky man.