Arshile Gorky au Musée d’art de Philadelphie

Sa vie a commencé et s’est terminée en traumatologie et tragédie, entre il fait de l’art que issu d’une psyché imprégnée instinct créatif. Le génocide arménien de son enfance en forme tout en son art. Après les marches forcées de nettoyage ethnique turc, et puis regarder sa mère mourir de faim, il émigre aux États-Unis et dans un effort pour forger une nouvelle vie et de l’identité a changé son nom à Arshile (Russe pour Achille) Gorki, en hommage au dramaturge russe.

Heureusement, cette pièce contient beaucoup de drame, notamment la deuxième partie de sa carrière. J’ai trouvé le travail peu de temps après son arrivée de l’Arménie à Boston MA, descendre à un début lent. Certains agréable, bien conçu, mais les paysages urbains et les résumés dérivés qui ne laisse pas entrevoir beaucoup à ce qui est à venir. Les premières choses qui attiré mon attention étaient une série d’œuvres sur papier et peintures appelées de nuit, Enigma et Nostalgie basé sur un petit De Chirico peinture “Fatal Temple”. Le De Chirico est inclus dans la même pièce qui fournit un lien vital à l’inspiration de Gorki. J’ai toujours pensé de De Chirico comme l’un des créateurs d’images les plus influents du 20e siècle. Tout le monde de Fellini à Guston devait De Chirico une dette picturale, il est encourageant de voir de l’art séminal de Gorki émanant de Giorgio DC.

Depuis que je vois De Chirco comme un peintre première et une deuxième surréaliste, Je trouve aussi les origines de Gorki plus sur le personnel de l’imagerie graphique inclinée de poste dogme et l’angoisse de la Première Guerre mondiale Surréalisme.

Gorki commence vraiment à obtenir le fonctionnement juteux d’une photographie de lui-même et sa mère. Bien que le portrait à l’huile peinte de ce groupe est un peu sur le côté raide, il ya un petit rendu d’encre qui est aussi puissant que n’importe quel stylo Rembrandt et encre. Son ici que son histoire devient presque aussi irrésistible que l’art que vous êtes sur le point de témoigner. Ce petit travail sur papier est si frété à la mémoire et poignant que c’est presque comme une note d’amour, et vous savez que ce sentiment va propulser et laisser infuser Tout le reste touches Gorki.

Une constante que j’ai trouvé tout au long de cette exposition est que les études de Gorki sur le papier semblent mieux représenter ses capacités hautement qualifiés en tant que dessinateur, et fournissent généralement un sens plus profond de son récit poétique visuelle. Je dis cela avec quelques remords car je pense que la plupart des artistes (y compris moi-même) se heurter à ce sentiment. Thats pour ne pas dire Gorki n’a pas peint des huiles sur toile très évolués qui contiennent composition nuancée et profonde, juste que la peinture à l’huile est résistant à la manipulation de causalité. Artistes du XXe siècle plus intéressés par l’imagerie d’interprétation mis généralement de côté les exigences techniquement exigeants de l’huile peinte poli perfection.

Même si Gorki aurait probablement fait ses peintures plus classique compétent, à son crédit, il a choisi de pincez une approche plus novatrice. Vers le milieu des années 30 Gorky a été installé dans un studio près de Union Square à New York. Ses prestigieux voisins inclus Stuart Davis et De Kooning. Il est petit groupe de portraits sur papier de certains de ses cohortes qui vantent les vertus de lignes fines et une main ferme. Ces dessins se tailler soigneusement leurs sujets comme deux bustes dimensions d’une manière que Picasso aurait envié. Gorky’s painting to this point has not been too exciting, but as he continues to delve into the wellspring of his childhood, a series of paintings called “Khorkom” (based on his Armenian hometown) begin to move into a more unencumbered realm. Color brightens and the rigidity of cubist form starts to loosen and detach from a concrete ground and gain some fluidity.

During the Depression Gorky hunkered down in Union Square while he got involved in the WPA. Although I found his surviving full sized Newark Airport murals overly blocky and heavy handed (obviously influenced by Davis, and not in a particularly good way), again his studies save the day. One small, elongated rectangular format for a mural design including a tri-engine aircraft, is so precise it seems to morph into an abstract graphite engineering blueprint for propellers. There are also a couple of small, playful gouaches that look like plans for toy planes.

In the forties Gorky begins to enter into his most energetic period. Putting aside his portraiture he launches a series of abstract paintings and gouaches based on his plein air sketches. He and his wife and two daughters relocated to the rural Virginia estate purchased by his father-in-law. Gorky had started to work from nature a few years earlier in Connecticut, but paintings such as “Garden of Suchi” based on memories of his father’s gardens in Armenia inform and infuse the work from his Virginia oeuvre. A bucolic dalliance with the birds and the bees inhabit the identity of these paintings, which finally integrate the intimate act of drawing with the broad flourishes of oil paint and gouache. Bursts of color saturate the canvas in transparent washes, fusing intricate lines that seem in a constant state of flux. Solids juxtapose the flatter planes becoming more dimensional, the fuller bodies of these pictures have become more substantially satisfying compositions to the eye. That Gorky’s mature work arose from his interaction with nature defines and sets him apart from his Abstract Expressionist brethren. I find this to be a breath of fresh air in the domain of sequestered urban studios of most other painters of that time (excluding Pollock’s studio in the Springs, but as far as I know although he painted outside, he didn’t paint from nature). Evocative titles such as “Scent of Apricots on the Fields” and “How My Mothers Apron Unfolds In My Life” populate his work from this period and reflect the fecundity seen spread out in this gallery. (Overall I like the way this show is laid out, but for some unfathomable reason the walls in the large room containing all the Virginia work have been painted with large brown swathes in a straight edged design, moving up and down the walls like a graph?!) But even as his work rose to new heights theres still lingering doubt for me surrounding the vacancies and voids that haunt his later art, especially in relation to a sense of missing figure /ground connections. Its as though a fog permeates the croma, subsuming and weakening his
resolve to work through and completely express a sensation.

However this struggle may actually increase Gorky’s aesthetic credibility, he’s not so interested in heroic results as he is in the emotional authenticity of his marks. You can tell he never pandered to critics or collectors; his work and soul is laid bare for all to see, complete with faults, foibles and failings. What a Sisyphean task his life became at the end. Rectal cancer, a younger wife grown weary of illness and depression takes up with a peer, a devastating studio fire that most likely consumed some of his best art (after losing some of my own best works on paper in a gallery fire in Maine last year, I can attest to the acute sense of loss), and then suicide.

Not only did Gorky endure until the end, but he focused his creative energies as a cathartic cure, throwing himself into the series of paintings called “The Plough and the Song”. The first canvas oozes a murky morass of sepia tints, but you can make out the vaunted Gorky passages emerging. By the time he got to the fourth and last version his mood has lifted significantly. The mise-en-scene recalls a sun drenched picnic of abstracted delight. There the good cheer ends. The last few rooms are devoted to his most fatalistic work. The series of paintings titled “Charred Beloved” are a gloomy bunch of smoky grey and black visages that seem less of an homage to the lost art, and more a funeral. Then suddenly the “Betrothal” paintings appear personifying everything Gorky strived for. Inverted lily pads drift downwards pulling our gaze along into a vivid dusk populated by unknowable entities striking classic poses like players on a stage. These epic narratives epitomize the unfettered nature of creative intuition, freeform and dreamlike, yet ironically they were closely engineered by Gorky. Some of his most striking late studies on paper employed the academic grid technique to facilitate assembling his imagery on larger scale. Yet his grids turned out to be a means to an end; they become integral to the visual integrity of his compositions on paper. Its testament to his savvy and guile as a painter that the “Betrothal” paintings seem so animated and elastic.

Of the final work “Diary of a Seducer” is truly spooky and prophetic. Spectral, ghost-like figures gracefully undulate in a softly darkened scene. Prefiguring Guston, a succinctly painted eyeball nestled on a black pillow stares out into the abyss. Enfin, dans 1947 “Limit”, his last painting, embraces Gorky’s ever recurring void. The black, splotchy form hovering mid-field simplifies everything. There is no doubt that this portends death, but theres no sense of urgency. The feel is of profound ambivalence, its not that he didn’t care, just that there was nothing else left to paint. Arshile Gorky 1902-1948 “I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for awhile”