Art review: 'Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective' @ MOCA

Arshile Gorky was an essential pivot in Modern abstract art -- a critical hinge between rarefied European aesthetics before World War II and a more muscular, thoroughly American variety that emerged after, in the late 1940s and 1950s. That's the way he still comes off in the rich, not-to-be-missed retrospective that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

A slight difference, though, distinguishes this show from the Guggenheim Museum's 1981 Gorky retrospective -- the last time the Armenian-born immigrant's art was surveyed in comparable depth. (MOCA's beautifully installed show has 73 paintings, 49 drawings and three small, carved sculptures.) Today the context is different.

We know a lot more about Gorky and his work, thanks to a proliferation of smaller, more focused exhibitions since then. Museum and gallery shows have looked closely at his portraits, his great series on the theme of "Betrothal," his final paintings and especially his drawings. His once-sketchy biography, distorted by a sheaf of letters now known to have been forged by a nephew, is fully fleshed out in the catalog's detailed chronology.

We also know a lot more about the early stirrings of postwar American abstraction. The old story, which had Abstract Expressionism springing forth like Athena from the head of Surrealism's Zeus among a heroic band of downtown New York artists, has long since collapsed.

Instead, its germination came from a much broader impulse, evident in art made from coast to coast. Gorky, who worked in rural Connecticut and Virginia and whose first museum solo was held in San Francisco in 1941, helps illuminate this bigger picture.

Around 1943 he began to make paintings with a carefully wrought, Surrealist-inspired under-drawing. Luminous sheets of layered, liquid color pour from these dispersed fields of organic, often prickly, sometimes erotically suggestive shapes. The surface web of color transforms the canvas into a visual membrane, a delicate tissue through which a strong, underlying structure is fleetingly glimpsed.

Like Paul Cézanne, the Post-Impressionist whose late-19th century work in the South of France Gorky revered, he forged a singular bridge to an artistically prolific future. After you see the show, dip into MOCA's gorgeous installation of Mark Rothko's big paintings of vaporous color to see what one master did with another, shorter-lived master's revelations.

Gorky was born Vosdanig Adoian in the tiny village of Khorkom, Turkish Armenia, probably in 1902. His father left for Rhode Island before the start of World War I, occasionally sending money home; his mother died in 1918, starving in the Armenian genocide. With his sister, the 16-year-old boy traveled half way across the world, first to Massachusetts and then to Providence. At 21 he moved to New York, planning to become an artist.

Gorky inventively introduced himself as a cousin of writer Maxim Gorky, the Russian political activist -- apparently unaware that the author, similarly orphaned, used a pseudonym. But this anecdote about naming is, in its way, profoundly American -- identity as a personally meaningful fabrication, tied to dreams of glory.

As a painter, Gorky was mostly self-taught. He enrolled in numerous schools but never stayed long. Instead, he looked at art in museums and gallery exhibitions.

The first MOCA room encapsulates most of his enthusiasms -- Impressionism, Cézanne, De Chirico's metaphysical dream-spaces and, most enduringly, Picasso's Cubism. All were made between 1924 and 1928, but their artistic sources date from the 1870s to the 1910s. Learning to paint, Gorky immersed himself in recent history.

His Cézanne pastiches, for example, assemble familiar objects -- apples, skull, jug, crumpled tapestry, etc. Their linear patterns of short, parallel brush strokes creating shallow optical space are derivative, yet the brushwork is distinctive. Paint is fluid, its application thinner and almost gestural. He's learning from Cézanne but using a different handwriting.

Looking at early Gorky is like seeing Cézanne or Picasso through a scrim of memory. Later, elements of Joan Miró would be added -- especially his radiant, atmospheric veils of color, the formal element of the Catalan artist's work most powerful for postwar American abstraction.

In the paintings Gorky made from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, Modern art's recent history is an episodic narrative. His personal history, especially memories of his mother, entwines with it.

The show features three important rooms. The first unites four paintings and five drawings in his series, "The Artist and his Mother," based on a faded photograph enlarged to life-size, but with the figures simplified. Gorky worked intermittently for a decade on the best of these.

Its surface is part structured architecture,  part elaborate sketch, midway between coalescing and dissolving. Areas are polished, the surface shaved smooth with a razor blade, as if imitating the look of a religious icon. The hands of mother and son are soft, round, unformed mitts, unable to utilize their given sense of touch. The work's variegated tactile paint articulates what the represented figures cannot manage.

It's a poignant image. And it sets up amazing later abstractions, such as  "How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life."

This mature painting is wholly abstract, a commotion of whiplash lines and disjointed runs of fluid color stitching together organic forms. Elusive memory wrestles with the immediacy of touch -- the loaded brush pressing and releasing as it moved across the canvas, meant to recall what a young child sees as his head cradles and tosses in his mother's apron-clad lap.

No wonder Willem de Kooning thought Gorky was the greatest.

Unfortunately, the second of the show's three great rooms falters. Missing is arguably Gorky's greatest painting, "The Liver is the Cock's Comb" (1944), at 6-by-8-feet certainly his most monumental effort. Los Angeles now claims the nation's largest Armenian community, for whom Gorky is a hero; but Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, citing condition concerns, would only lend its painting to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, primary organizer of the show, where it had its debut in October.

It's a pity, especially as MOCA also owns the finished drawing for the work.

The third great room has four "Betrothal" works from 1947, the year before Gorky's suicide after an extended period of physical ailments, emotional upheaval and tragic personal events; it includes MOCA's own masterpiece, "Betrothal I." Slits, flowery claws, phallic forms, bursting pods, spiny shapes and other fantasies of organic regeneration proliferate within a thin, wholly independent cloud of soft ocher, punctuated with pale blue, violet, green and yellow.

A large charcoal and crayon drawing shows the degree to which these paintings' compositions were not spontaneous but carefully planned. (He learned a lot from Chilean émigré Roberto Matta.) Gorky turns Surrealism into something less impulsive and instinctive and more reasoned, if no less psychologically fraught. But the response to it is not in your head. It happens in your kinesthetic sense, where the strain and disconnect fumbles in your muscles.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Sept. 20. Closed Tue. and Wed. Admission: $10. www.moca.org

Photos: Arshile Gorky (circa 1902-1948), "Agony," 1947; "The Artist and His Mother," 1926-36; "Study for The Liver is the Cock's Comb," 1943; "Waterfall," 1943; Credit: MOCA, Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Comments

[william wray]

I get the feeling Gorky could have been a good cartoonist. I see abstracted cartoon style dogs everywhere especially the first one pictured. His work reminds me if Tex Avery was an Abstract Expressionist

[Jeff Yount]

“ The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist.

Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview. ” - Arshile Gorky

[P.J.A.]

Late Gorky and Kandinsky were the great ones.

[Lexter]

A great in depth exhition about Gorky. I could clearly the art movement from this exhibition: cubist, impressionist, surrealist, etc. Love the exhibition space very much as well. Curator did an amazing job on this one. Would highly recommend everyone to see this hard to find collection.

[MikeOHara]

I saw this exhibit in Philly at Xmas. It's bloody incredible.

[boris8]

Maksim Gorky a "political actvist"?! He was a novelist!

[Ergun Kirlikovali]

Dr. Andrew Mango of BBC (1947-1986) and a world renown researcher, writer and consultant on modern Turkey (1986-current) who happened to be chairing a scholarly conference at the London School of Economics on 29 January 2010, titled "Turkish-Armenian Relations", just when this same Gorky exhibit was at TATE Museum of London, had this
thought provoking comment in his opening remarks, about the disinformation in Gorky's biography:

" This meeting is being held to commemorate Turkish diplomats killed by Armenian terrorists between 1973 and 1985. The first to be murdered were the Turkish consul and his assistant in Los Angeles in January 1973 - thirty-seven years ago.

Our purpose here tonight should also be to prevent the perpetuation of ethnic hatred through the propagation of myths. In the last few weeks, for example, articles I read about an exhibition of the American modernist painter Arshile Gorky, who was of Armenian origin, said that Gorky's mother had died when the Armenians fled from the siege of Van, and that the Turkish army butchered 2 million Armenians in 1920.

In fact, there was no siege of Van by the Turks, but an Armenian uprising in Van in 1915 which facilitated the capture of the city by the Russian army and resulted in the murder of many of the city's Muslim inhabitants and the flight of the rest. Nor did the Turkish army kill 2 million Armenians in 1920. In fact there had been 1.5 million Armenians in the whole of Ottoman Anatolia when WWI started, and close on a million of them survived as refugees.

What happened were four waves of ethnic cleansing by Armenians of Turks and of Armenians by Turks, which left more Muslims than Armenians dead, as the front moved west, then east twice before a frontier was finally drawn between Turkey and Armenia in December 1920."

I do not intend to engage in an all out debate of the entire Turkish-Armenian conflict but just raise public awareness and sensitivity towards partisan and unfair interpretations of events of WWI by the Armenian lobby.
After all, it this ability to explore and discuss controversial issues in a reasoned, civilized, if not also scholarly manner, is one of the attributes that make
a museum community a rich and vibrant place.

As long as the retrospective refers to art, not political propaganda, it can be appreciated and cherished. But there is a significant problem with the introduction of the artist: a controversial piece if history, still hotly
debated by historians, is being subtly misrepresented to unsuspecting art lovers as settled history, whereas the historical facts are far from it.

[Christopher Knight]

Interesting that boris8 apparently thinks that writing fiction cannot be a political activity. This will be news to readers of Maxim Gorky.

[Franklin]

Even more interesting that Ergun Kirlikovali provides a blatant example of fiction written as a political activity. In this case, the political goal is to support the Turkish state's ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide. This will be news to readers of credible historical scholarship.

[Ergun Kirlikovali]

BIAS & BIGOTRY IN THE TERM “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”

If one cherishes values like fairness, objectivity, truth, and honesty, then one should really use the term “Turkish-Armenian conflict”. Asking one “Do you accept or deny Armenian Genocide” shows anti-Turkish bias. The question should be re-phrased “What is your stand on the Turkish-Armenian conflict?”

Turks believe it was an inter communal warfare mostly fought by Turkish and Armenian irregulars, a civil war which is engineered, provoked, and waged by the Armenian revolutionaries, with active support from Russia, England, France, and others, all eyeing the vast territories of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, against a backdrop of a raging world war.

Armenians, on the other hand, totally ignoring Armenian agitation, raids, rebellions, treason, territorial demands, and Turkish victims killed by Armenians, unfairly claim that it was a one way genocide.

GENOCIDE ALLEGATIONS IGNORE “THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT”

While some in unsuspecting public may be forgiven for taking the blatant and ceaseless Armenian propaganda at face value and believing Armenian falsifications merely because they are repeated so often, it is difficult and painful for someone like me, the son of Turkish survivors on both maternal and paternal sides.

Those seemingly endless “War years” of 1912-1922 brought wide-spread death and destruction on to all Ottoman citizens. No Turkish family was left touched, mine included. Those nameless, faceless Turkish victims are killed for a second time today with politically motivated and baseless charges of Armenian genocide.

ALLEGATIONS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE ARE RACIST AND DISHONEST HISTORY

They are racist because they ignore the Turkish dead: about 3 million during WWI; more than half a million of them at the hands of Armenian nationalists.

And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they simply dismiss

THE SIX T’S OF THE TURKISH-ARMENIAN CONFLICT.

[Gary]

I think Ergun Kirlikovali's posting is a grave disrespect to Arshile Gorky's memory as well as to the Armenian American community, not to mention the descendents of the Armenians who perished in the Armenian Genocide. His posting has no place in this forum and should be promptly removed.

[Franklin]

I agree with Gary. This art exhibition review should not serve as a forum for political diatribes, particularly those advocating genocide denial. Despite the importance of freedom of speech, hate speech in the form of genocide denial has no place here. The web link for Mr. Kirkovali makes clear his reprehensible agenda promoting genocide denial, historical falsehoods, and ethnic hatred. Since this forum is moderated, I would urge the blocking of the two comments submitted thus far by Ergun Kirlikovali.

[Happy Song]

What a wonderful show! My best friend and I made a date to see it together. There was live music and so many people were anticipating to see the show. I didn't realize that Gorky had created such a vast array of paintings and even sculptures. I could definitely see that Cezanne and Picasso had influenced his earlier works. Eventually, his style evolved to his own signature, and the results are sensual and mesmerizing. I hope that everyone has a chance to see this overwhelming collection of his works when in LA. I feel very honored and lucky to have witnessed it easily living here. Thank you to LA Times for this article as well. As a suggestion, buy a membership and you can receive invitations to these members only previews.

[Franklin]

This is a really impressive exhibit. It's astounding to see how powerful and compelling abstract art can be. Gorky employed a rich variety of styles, techniques, and innovations as he evolved as an artist, opening avenues for his artistic peers and later generations to explore. Such a comprehensive retrospective is probably a once in a lifetime event, given how difficult it is to pull together such a dispersed and valuable body of work. I can barely wait to go back to MOCA and experience it again.