InSight considers the drawings of Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorky, one of the godfathers of Abstract Expressionism.
InSight No. 192
Arshile Gorky, Untitled, 1946
In the summer of 1946, the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) left New York for the country house of his parents-in-law in Virginia. The farm was called Crooked Run, and he, his wife and their two young daughters stayed until November. While there the glowing hearth of the living room became a focal point for his drawings. Several were made on his wife’s writing paper, but he also treated the subject in larger drawings such as the one considered here. Some were coloured with crayon, and these provide information about his subject matter. A blaze of smouldering red and orange in one drawing identifies the position of the fireplace. A figure with remarkable contortions stands on the left-hand side in some compositions.
The art critic Robert Hughes said Gorky’s ‘life as a mature artist formed a Bridge of Sighs between Surrealism and America’. He was exhibited along with other advanced European artists at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York, and Gorky’s four solo exhibitions there included one of ‘colored drawings’. (Although Gorky chose not to title his drawings, which makes identification all but impossible, the drawing illustrated above was likely included in that exhibition, which was held the spring after the Gorky family’s stay at Crooked Run Farm.) According to the art historian Martica Sawin, Levy made his gallery ‘a veritable beachhead of Surrealism in the United States’ and besides Gorky he also exhibited Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux and Max Ernst.
To Robert Hughes, Gorky was not merely a bridge but rather a ‘Bridge of Sighs’ because of the portentous emotions he invested in his work. His suicide in 1948 followed a short, often unhappy life. In language less poetic and more scientific than Hughes’s, the critic Harold Rosenberg thought Gorky’s work was ‘almost a visual metaphor of the digestion of European painting on this side of the Atlantic and its conversion into a new substance.’ This meant that, ‘by whatever measure one ranks the founders of contemporary American abstract art, Arshile Gorky has a place on the top row.’
Although this untitled drawing appears to be spontaneous and informal, it belongs with a sequence of drawings in which Gorky studied the same few motifs. They recur in many drawings from his stay in Virginia in 1946, and these have come to be known by an unofficial title — ‘Fireplace in Virginia’. One especially identifiable motif is an unusually shaped chair and a standing lamp at the upper right-hand corner. (In this drawing, the only area of crayon is a streak of yellow that suggests the glow of electric light.) As well as drawing and redrawing the same few objects, which suggests not spontaneity but rather determined concentration, Gorky’s mark-making is fastidious and personally distinctive. His sheets of paper contain isolated, cipher-like formal units. None is doodled or improvised; they are terse, strange and often incomprehensible. Yet to the artist these units, which so palpably reveal the means of their making, were not merely abstracted formulas. They signified an image. With rhetorical panache and uncertain accuracy, Hughes likened these units to ‘flower stems, tendons, human sexual organs, claws, stamens, guts, and feathers.’
Gorky died before the advent of Abstract Expressionism. In an article about “American-type” painting published in 1955, the modernist critic Clement Greenberg wrote of Gorky as ‘one of the greatest painters that this country and this time produced’. He believed Gorky had taken a crucial step towards that planar flatness which Greenberg took to be the logical and necessary development of ‘Picassoid space’ (i.e. the cubist shattering of single-point perspective and the consequent disintegration of pictorial unity). In his paintings of 1947, Gorky continued to work in the personal style he originated around 1943. From the drawings he made at Crooked Run Farm the previous year, paintings such as Soft Night came to include comparably contorted furniture- and figure-like forms. He stained the canvas with thinned oil colour, a technique that emphasised the surface of the painted object, even as the shapely pictorial forms seem to writhe with fluid volumes that behave less like solid objects and more like air or water.
Notwithstanding his ‘paint-wise hands’, Gorky was ‘an orthodox easel-painter’ and Greenberg believed that ‘fugitive, informal sketches, in drawings and in rapidly done oils on paper’, reached greater heights than the ‘finished and edited oils’. In a monograph about Gorky published in 1966, Julien Levy explained Gorky’s hard-won intimacy with drawing. He was impoverished when he emigrated from his native Armenia to the United States in 1920, and economic conditions were such that ‘the plentiful possession of paints and canvas’ were ‘an almost unattainable dream of luxury’. These material restrictions helped to foster his talents as a draughtsman because they ‘forced him to confine his unrelenting creative energies almost exclusively to pencil and paper’. In works such as the untitled drawing shown above, Gorky digested his immediate surroundings and transformed them into strange, spindly, animated forms. Without this difficult act of transformation, the seed of mid-century American abstract painting may never have been sewn.
Images:
Gorky drawing in a field at Crooked Run Farm, summer 1944, photographed by his wife Agnes Magruder Gorky © Estate of Agnes Magruder Gorky
The catalogue for Arshile Gorky’s 1945 exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery
Arshile Gorky, [Fireplace in Virginia], 1946, crayon and ink on paper, 21.4 x 27.6 cm, Private Collection
Arshile Gorky, [Fireplace in Virginia], 1946, ink and crayon on paper, 21.4 x 27.3 cm, Private Collection
Arshile Gorky, Soft Night, 1947, oil on canvas, 96.8 x 127.3 cm, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Arshile Gorky, Untitled
