Arshile Gorky is just as troublesome a personality today, some fifty-one years after his suicide, as he was to his “loves,” his friends, and his enemies while he lived. His name was not Arshile Gorky, and he was not, as he claimed, a nephew of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He was not even Russian at all, but an Armenian who fled as a teenager from the terrible genocide by the Turks in 1915.

His Armenian nationality and nostalgia for his village, Khorkam, became the leitmotif of everything Gorky did, both artistic and personal, in spite of his claims to be Russian, to have studied in Paris, and to have attended Brown University. In fact, although he arrived in America early enough to have become assimilated, and most of his friends, girlfriends, and wives were sophisticated Easterners, he was never really comfortable in American culture, remaining rather a primitive European in his language and his behavior, especially towards the women in his life. And, in spite of the long apprenticeship he underwent in Boston and New York on his unsteady and protracted pathway to maturity as a painter, he retained a more European than American vision as an artist. It was commented upon at the time by Clement Greenberg.

Gorky had excessively strong outbursts of emotion all his life and was subject to terrible depressions. At the end, in spite of the loving self-sacrifice of his wife, Agnes Magruder nicknamed Mougouch, and the solicitude of their many good friends, Gorky seems to have collapsed mentally into self-pity and paranoia. He became so physically violent that Mougouch and their two very young daughters had to flee to her family’s home in Virginia. Left alone, Gorky roamed New York day and night until friends took him back to his Connecticut studio. There he telephoned everyone he knew and then hanged himself in a little shed on a neighbor’s property with “Good-bye my loves” written in the sand beneath his feet.

It is true, of course, that he had suffered some serious setbacks in his last years. A barn fire which he set accidentally destroyed a considerable batch of his work, and cancer had forced him to get a colostomy which required complex eating and cleansing regimes. However, Gorky produced at least twenty-seven paintings in a paroxysm of work after the fire and was recovering remarkably well from his cancer. The mental deterioration came at a time when his fame and success were just emerging from the shadows, although he sensed the beginning of some competition from his ex-acolyte Willem de Kooning and from Jackson Pollock. In short, Gorky’s life and his carefully masked persona are a tissue of lies, contradictions, false leads, dead ends, and still unsolved mysteries.

All this Matthew Spender tries bravely to deal with in his new biography of the artist, From a High Place. Mr. Spender is uniquely qualified for the task since he is an artist himself and well acquainted with the world of galleries, critics, curators, patrons, and the lot, and he is married to Gorky’s older daughter, Maro. He has therefore had many years’ exposure to the family folklore and has been a close enough insider to learn all that could be learned from his mother-in-law, Mougouch, who is still very much alive and whose stamp on this book must be acknowledged.

Yet this is no bowdlerized life. Spender gives us the warts and all, trying as best he can to explain, but not to explain away, the tragedy-inducing contradictions in Gorky’s character. Spender has had access to Mougouch’s diaries and we are privy to a remarkably complete, almost day-by-day, account of his movements, contacts, moods, and mood-swings which illuminates brightly the dark corners of Gorky’s last years, which were also his greatest years as an artist. Spender’s exemplary research has uncovered new material about the New York art world of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s and gives vivid depictions of the survival strategies of artists during the Great Depression: the mural projects of the WPA, the friendships, politics, and intellectual connections of the more advanced painters and sculptors of the time. Cameo appearances on this stage by Stuart Davis, Fernand Léger, Willem de Kooning, J. J. Sweeney, Alfred Barr, Pierre Matisse, Julian Levy, and many other familiar names put into focus that much-studied time better than any other account I know.

At the beginning of the Second World War, many Surrealists who fled Europe arrived in New York, congregating at the galleries of Pierre Matisse, Julian Levy, and Peggy Guggenheim. Their presence created a new and very positive atmosphere for Gorky whose work loosened and whose paints thinned to take advantage of so-called “accidents.” He was deeply impressed with the example of Matta and consciously sought to surpass him, attracting the approval of André Breton, the high priest of Surrealism, then in New York to escape the war. Breton urged Gorky to go to Paris where he promised to make him a star.

Spender’s account begins with Gorky’s childhood in the Armenian area of Lake Van in Northeastern Turkey. Peasant superstitions, walled gardens, semi-ruined ancient monasteries, his strong-willed mother, who was deeply attached to this medieval peasant world, all come vividly alive in these pages drawn from many interviews with the survivors of Gorky’s extended Armenian family. Gorky himself, with his art world friendships and his marriage to a certified Eastern Wasp, would launch into wailing chants at parties or dance alone with arms in the air in some Greek-like Mediterranean step, but would refuse to answer or would give misleading replies whenever questioned about his youth, his real name, and his family.

After arriving in the United States, living with various family members, and deciding to become, as he put it, “a great artist or a great crook,” Gorky began to fashion the complex persona which enmeshed him in an ever deeper quicksand of lies. He was forever trying to overcome his limitations by a bit of plagiarism. While teaching at the Grand Central School of Art in New York in 1926, he published an interesting poem in the school yearbook. Unfortunately, as Spender tells us, it was written by Siamanto, an important Armenian poet. As his career progressed and as he sought to fight his way towards a position in the ranks of the modernists he read about and saw illustrated in magazines like Cahiers d’Art, he became another kind of plagiarist, painting near-Cézannes, Braques and Picassos that skirt the edges of forgery. Nearly all critics and art historians have noted Gorky’s curiously protracted apprenticeship in which he copied now one style, now another of the principle European modernists.

The story of the Newark Airport murals, which Gorky painted in 1936 under the Federal Art Project of the WPA, is well told by Spender who stresses Gorky’s apolitical stance in the 1930s when, all around him in the intellectual and artistic milieu of New York, the Communist Party was a dominant force. While disdaining Communism and its tentacles, Gorky curiously never wavered in his defense of Stalin as a Russian strongman with whom he could identify; he had learned in his childhood to prefer Russians to Turks. Temperamentally he preferred the strongman in politics (or as we now call him, the dictator) not because he was a fascist but because as a man he saw himself as a dictator of his family, expecting from wives and children total obedience and suppression of self.

With all the strutting, posturing, and excessive heartiness alternating with depressed moods, Gorky must have been a tiresome person to be close to. Indeed, he was always breaking angrily with his friends and assuming enemies, whether real or not. Yet he seemed also to have had lovable, vulnerable, and deeply touching qualities which appealed to the few who stayed loyal to him. The dichotomies of his character are reflected in his work. Even the most freely painted and apparently improvisational works are, in fact, carefully composed and often based on squared-up drawings in the standard academic practice. In more than one instance he made nearly identical second versions of such seemingly spontaneous paintings; in one case, he made three.

In his eagerness to scale the success ladder, Gorky paid unseemly attention to the praise Clement Greenberg gave to one of the less finished paintings in his first Julian Levy Gallery show. Gorky’s subsequent bout of work focused entirely on paintings in a similar style, interrupting the more fully painted, denser paintings which are his real masterworks. What about those masterworks, which, as Spender points out, have survived and are now finally in great museums like the Metropolitan, MOMA, and the Tate? Our author remains strictly a biographer and does not make any critical assessment or art historical claims for Gorky’s position. Certainly he can be called the first Abstract Expressionist and, because of the war and the Surrealists, he was a bridge between the American and European aesthetic positions. He must also be credited with making some of the most sheerly beautiful paintings and drawings by any artist of his time. But he was never truly original. The cribbing from Miró and Matta, and some early Kandinsky, is unmistakable. While Matta never painted a canvas as beautiful as Gorky at his best, one could argue that had Gorky never lived and painted the history of art would not have to be revised very much. He never made the breakthrough that de Kooning and Pollock did, both reaching fulfillment just about the time that Gorky died.

Spender makes no mention of Harry Rand’s curious iconographical exercise of claiming to identify the exact subject matter underlying these seemingly abstract drawings and paintings.[1] Nor is any mention made of the somewhat unsatisfactory catalogue raisonné of all Gorky’s work edited by Jim M. Jordan with an exemplary introduction by the late Robert Goldwater (the best short description of Gorky’s work and his position in art history).[2] What we do have in this fine biography is a sympathetic and clarifying account of a consciously hidden and distorted life, deflating some myths and coming close to the real story of a tragic figure whose quixotic poses and ultimate suicide may have had more to do with his work reaching the limit of his powers than with his medical condition or marital troubles.

Notes
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1. Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols by Harry Rand (Allanheld & Schram, 1981). Go back to the text.
2. The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue by Jim M. Jordan and Robert Goldwater (New York University Press, 1982). See my review in The New Criterion (September 1982). Go back to the text.