Arshile Gorky, The Plough and the Song, 1947. Oil on canvas, 128.3 x 159.1 cm. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. R.T. Miller Jr. Fund.
This painting, more than any other, seems a pure construction of Gorky’s childhood. Bright yellows, dynamic figures, and what appear to be smiling lips color The Plough and the Song a golden hue, marred only by dark splotches of black and grey that, though unsettling, do not seem foreign invaders in this deeply emotional landscape.
Painted the year before Gorky committed suicide, The Plough and the Song is memory brought to life, and then colored to suit the eye of the beholder. For Gorky, the recreation of his idyllic childhood--pre-genocide, pre-exile, pre-America--was contingent on the suspension of disbelief. The Plough and the Song seems an attempt not only to recreate was lost but to reframe it in a way that skirted over the bad.
Arshile Gorky, How My Mother’s EmbroideredApron Unfolds in My Life, 1944. Oil on canvas, 258.1 x 290.8 cm. Seattle Art Museum.
Solid patches of yellow, blue, and red run together, dripping into each other--new colors, caught in cobwebs of lines and shapes, trickle downward. Aesthetically, How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life is a mess--but it is a deliberate mess.
Is Gorky referring to the only photograph of his childhood, the one in which he and his mother--in a long, floral dress--pose together? Is his mother's apron her legacy: mixed and tragic and loving and brutal, all at once? Everything goes every which way and nothing makes much sense, but in the mess of lines and shapes there is cohesion.
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, circa 1926-1936. Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 127 cm. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father.
Created and refashioned over the course of ten years, The Artist and His Mother is, without a doubt, Gorky's most enduring work. The painting is rendered from a photograph taken before the genocide--a photograph sent to his absent father, a wordless plea to return. Gorky, still a boy, stands next to his seated, veiled mother, clutching a bouquet of flowers. In the context of its intended target, Gorky's presence is telling. His mother chose him--and not one of his sisters--as if to remind Setrag of his responsibility to his family.
But Setrag never came, and Gorky--not more than eleven years of age--took his place at the head of the family. The start of the genocide, the siege and destruction of Van, the desperate race to Etchmiadzin, the battle for survival in Erevan; throughout these, Gorky was responsible for the safety of his large family. Perhaps, in The Artist and His Mother, Gorky points the finger of accusation at his absent father--the one who received a photograph and never came to rescue them. Perhaps he needed something to remember his mother by. Her unfinished hands speak to the violent emotion muffled beneath its smooth surface--their serenity betrays his sadness.
The Garden of Wish Fulfillment
The Art and Life of Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky, Untitled, circa 1927-1926.
It is tempting to see in this untitled work as a portrait of Gorky's own family, shrunken and fractured as it was at the time of its creation--his mother, his sisters, himself, the martyrs of a Christian genocide, crucified in their own particular fashion.
And certainly, the connections between the life of Jesus and the life of Arshile Gorky are not few--though Gorky was neither a prophet nor a shepherd's son, Jesus died for the sins of man and Armenians died for Jesus, however unwillingly. But the Armenian Genocide was not for him a national tragedy but rather a personal one.
It is impossible to deny the work's inherent Christian element--Gorky was born and raised on the shores of Lake Van. When he was a boy, his mother would take him to Akhtamar Island, and its Cathedral of the Holy Cross, a symbol of Armenian religion. On its walls are carved the Armenian Christian saga--Noah's Ark comes to rest on the slopes of Mount Ararat, David slays Goliath, the Virgin holds her holy son.
Untitled is not an example of Armenian sentimentality--rather, it represents the specific sacrifice of the Adoian family.
Arshile Gorky, Agony, 1947, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 1⁄2 in., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, A. Conger Goodyear Fund, © 2010 Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Agony is fire. Agony is volcanic--in its anger and desperation and loud, crazed ecstasy, it gives voice to Gorky's inner monologue. Dreamt up in Virginia's countryside, in a field, in the middle of silence, Gorky imagined hell.
It is, again, tempting to explain Agony in terms of the genocide--in terms of the days and nights the Armenians of Van spent on their feet, fleeing an invisible foe, in terms of death and suffering and his mother's last breath, but Agony is much more complicated. On the brink of suicide, teetering on the edge of a vast precipice and already neck-deep in sadness, this painting, universal in its breadth, is incredibly personal, but perhaps not in the way one might imagine. His life in America was not happy, especially as the forties drew to a close; his studio burned to the ground, his wife had an affair, he broke his neck and painting arm in an accident, his wife eventually left him and took his children. Questions with no answers and ideas that flit away like butterflies dot Gorky's hellscape.
Arshile Gorky, The Limit, 1947. Oil paper mounted on canvas. 128.9 x 157.5 cm. Private collection of the Arshile Gorky Foundation.
The Limit is a masterpiece, seminal among Abstract Expressionists, the product of Gorky's intensifying preoccupation with his past. As the years wore on and Gorky came to grips with his life and his loss, an explosion of creativity sent Gorky back to the most essential part of his identity, the one he prioritized above all others: his Armenianness, his exile.
This painting could be interpreted in many different ways, but it is most compelling to consider it in terms of his displacement. Living in New York, permanently American, never to return to the place of his birth, Gorky was adrift--separated from his memories, separated from the site of childhood, the site of his mother's death, separated from the things he spent his entire life trying to get over.
The Limit is that emotional frontier--unsurmountable, impassable, its treasures irretrievable.
Arshile Gorky, Portrait of Vartoosh, circa 1936-1937. Oil on canvas. Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Vartoosh, Gorky's sister, was one of just a few tangible links to his past in Armenia. Though their older sisters were separated from them soon after their arrival in Erevan--enough money was sent by their father so that they might escape to the United States, Vartoosh remained alongside Gorky and their ailing, starving mother until her death in 1919. It was then that they, two orphans among tens of thousands, were plucked from the Caucasus and taken westward by a family friend, first to Constantinople and then to New York, where they reunited with their sisters and their long-absent father.
Horrified by what, to them, seemed a decadent lifestyle--one of relative comfort and prosperity and completely devoid of genocidal murderers, in any case--Vartoosh and Gorky were never at home among their family members. She was the only other person to have witnessed Shushan's death, the only other person to have stayed with him from the very beginning--and Shushan perished in their arms. This portrait, painted in the late 1930s, reflects their relationship, built on the foundation of tragedy.
Arshile Gorky, Untitled (Self-Portrait), circa 1928-1929. Pastel and graphite on paper, 36.2 x 28.58 cm. Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.
Dark eyes, big nose, tawny face. An American, Gorky was nevertheless other--an immigrant, born in a land few could place on a map, Gorky wore exotic on his face. This self-portrait is one of his most emotional works. His stare does not challenge so much as hide. A canyon existed between him and everyone else, apart from his sister, Vartoosh.
No man is an island, but if there ever was a man so peninsular he was one earthquake from complete disembodiment, it was Arshile Gorky.
Arshile Gorky, Untitled (Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia), circa 1931-1933. Ink on paper, 64.77 x 92.71 cm.
Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia is a product of diaspora, an instance of pure emotional loss, second only perhaps to The Artist and His Mother. The painting, while abstract, does carry some of the imagery of the real world—the central third is rendered much like a window. To its left, a canvas—from which the foot of skeletal figure protrudes—sits propped against a wall.
It is interesting to consider this artwork a snapshot in time. Gorky, working on a project, staring out of the window, surrounded by all the trappings of a comfortable, fulfilled life: with his art, in his apartment, perhaps even by his lover--but the blurred lines between his art and reality are never clearer than in Nighttime, and Nostalgia.
Arshile Gorky. The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), oil on canvas, 73 1/4 x 98" (186 x 249 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, K1956:4, gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1956
The Liver is the Cock's Comb is one of Gorky's best-loved works. Andre Breton, French writer and poet and father of Surrealism, declared it "one of the most important paintings made in America" and dubbed it a Surrealist masterpiece--a high-order compliment for any artist, but especially an artist who'd taught himself how to paint after escaping genocide.
Cockscomb is the name of the fleshy crown that sits atop a rooster's skull, and the common name of a fuzzy colorful flower, curled and twisted in on itself like brain coral. The liver was once the "seat of the passions, particularly sensual love and anger" (according to Horace, a Roman poet.) The Liver is the Cock's Comb is symbolically dense and nigh-on indecipherable, but it remains one of Gorky's most celebrated works of art.