Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work

by Hayden Herrera

Overview

From the Author of Frida, the Moving and Heroic Story of One of the Central Painters of the Twentieth Century

Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky-and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cézanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948.

A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-Arshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466817081
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/03/2005
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	784
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Hayden Herrera is the author of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Mary Frank, and Matisse: A Portrait. She lives in New York City.

Hayden Herrera is the author of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, Mary Frank, and Matisse: A Portrait. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

ARSHILE GORKY

PART I

1
Charahan Surp Nishan
 

 

On a summer night in 1903 near the shore of Lake Van in Turkish Armenia, the Der Marderosian family gathered in their ancient monastery church, Charahan Surp Nishan. Arshile Gorky's grandmother, the widow Hamaspiur, had brought the family together to hold a vigil for her youngest son, sixteen-year-old Nishan, who had vanished several days before. She suspected that he had been abducted by Kurds, for he had fallen in love with a Kurdish girl whose brother took offense. Widow Hamaspiur knew that Armenians who erred in any way were fair game for Turkish or Kurdish brutality. Only five years earlier, her husband, Sarkis Der Marderosian, the last of a long line of Armenian apostolic priests, had been nailed to the door of the church where he served in Van City.
Gorky's mother, Shushan, may have joined her mother and her five siblings at this vigil. Perhaps Shushan brought her children to the vigil too--her daughters, Akabi and Satenik, and her tiny son, Vosdanig, who a year or so later would be renamed Manouk and a quarter of a century after that, in America, would change his name to Arshile Gorky.
As the Der Marderosian family sat on the carpet-covered floor beneath the smoke-blackened dome of the tiny stone church, the faint flicker of incense candles lit their solemn faces. The summer heat, the darkness outside, and the binding mood of apprehension made the square room seem close. Finally, over the murmur of their prayers came the sound of a thud against the heavy wooden church doors. Hamaspiur Der Marderosian rose to open them. On the threshold lay her favoriteson's body. It was covered with dagger wounds and his clothes were soaked in blood.
Centuries of living as a subject minority in Ottoman Turkey had given the Armenian people, once known for their rugged independence, a fatalistic passivity, but Hamaspiur did not follow her countrymen's habit of accepting fate. Instead she clenched her fists and wept. Months went by and each day the force with which she rejected God's will grew. She paced back and forth inside the church dedicated to the fifth-century saint Yeghisheh, whose power to cure madness gave Charahan Surp Nishan its name: Holy Sign of the Demon Seizer. In her fury, Hamaspiur resembled the insane people who used to be chained to a pillar near Saint Yeghisheh's relics until their screams were spent and the devils within them were expelled. No such miracle would cure her grief. Her endless pacing took her out into the graveyard, past her husband's gravestone, where she could look over the ever-changing surface of Lake Van, a lake so vast it has been called an inland sea. Hamaspiur Der Marderosian beat her hands and forehead against the church doors and cried, "Why, oh God, did you take him?" There was no answer except, her family said, in recurrent nightmares, and that answer gave no solace: "Beat not on my doors," said the voice of God. Having been warned in a dream that his mother's blasphemy would bring a curse on her family, her eldest son, Moses, tried to silence her. But Hamaspiur's grief was beyond even her son's remonstrations.
To revenge herself against God, Hamaspiur set Charahan Surp Nishan on fire. Only the wooden parts of the structure, the altar, and other accoutrements burned. Most of the church was built of stone and remained intact. The local villagers were horrified at what Hamaspiur had done. With this act of sacrilege, the Der Marderosians' official ties to the church were severed. Hamaspiur left the walled monastery complex to spend the last six years of her life in a monastery in the mountain village of Ermerur. Charahan Surp Nishan and its lands were rented to a priest and fell into decay.
Arshile Gorky would look back with admiration at his grandmother's rebellious spirit. As a grown man, he had a passion for fire. "I think our lives flow like a molten lava," he said. The hot light of embers and flames glows in many of his paintings and drawings. For Gorky no celebration was complete without a bonfire, and every fire he built had to be a conflagration. But, according to family legend, Hamaspiur's fire had broughta curse on her descendants. Though he left religion as a young man, Gorky was superstitious, and he felt that curse. He told friends that his mother used to call him "the black one, the unlucky one who will come to a no-good end." The fatalistic attitude with which he bore life's sufferings astonished those close to him.
This fatalism showed up during the Great Depression when poverty, neglect, and the struggles associated with being an artist nearly overwhelmed him: Gorky would shrug his shoulders and say that to suffer for art was his destiny. Discussing thought versus feeling in art with friends at the Waldorf Cafeteria in New York in the 1930s, Gorky startled them by suddenly interjecting: "The story of Christ is misunderstood. In my ancient country we saw the story differently. The figure of Christ was that of a man of fate, not a man of tragedy who gives his life to save us. In my country the son is a man of fate. It is the fate of the son to kill his father, but Christ's father was God and Christ couldn't kill God." His companions assumed that Gorky was talking about his compulsion to be loyal to father Picasso. Gorky could not kill off his artistic progenitor; he had to follow as a worthy disciple. "I am not a man burdened by art but necessarily doing what I must do," Gorky said. "I am, therefore, not a tragic hero like Christ but I am a man of fate."
Copyright © 2003 by Hayden Herrera

Editorial Reviews

it is hard to imagine that Herrera's study will soon be superseded. — Arthur C. Danto

The Los Angles Times

Hayden Herrera has written the definitive biography of Arshile Gorky -- lucid, persuasive, meticulous, intimate and refreshingly cleareyed. Gorky is the sort of artist who in his life as much as his work invites extreme responses; and some of his biographers and critics have been unable to avoid lionizing him as the singular genius of his generation or dismissing him as a slave to greater masters. Herrera recognizes his strengths and weaknesses. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work makes the case for his position as the bridge between European Cubism and Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, but acknowledges that some of his work is simply a restatement of Matisse, Picasso or Miro. — Andrew Solomon

NY Times Sunday Book Review

By the end of Ms. Herrera's accelerating narrative, you may wish it would continue, following Gorky's widow and daughters as they come to terms with the legacy he left them. Perhaps Ms. Herrera's next book will tell that story. It seems to be one that she knows exceptionally well. — Roberta Smith

The New York Times

Most recently seen as a silent, enigmatic figure in the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's Ararat, modernist painter Gorky (1900?-1948) is fastidiously served in this comprehensive biography. Born near Lake Van in Ottoman-held Armenia, the young Gorky witnessed the Armenian genocide, a horror that Herrera (Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo) covers with extreme care. Following Gorky's emigration to the U.S. in 1920 and his name change from Manouk Adoian (he claimed to be the cousin of Russian writer Maxim Gorky), Herrera establishes the bulk of the narrative around Gorky's paintings, describing what he was working on when and under what circumstances. Most of Gorky's work life was based in New York, where, by the 1930s, he was paid a salary by the WPA for murals and other work in his surrealist style, largely derived from Miro and Leger, as the 64 pages of color and b&w images affirm. Herrera expects and encounters many difficulties in untangling the secretive Gorky's feelings and mostly confines herself to quoting others extensively, including long passages from the letters of Gorky's American wife, Agnes Magruder (or as Gorky called her, "Mougouch"). Herrera's restraint and suspension of judgment can flatten out events, yet she lingers for paragraphs on Gorky's many paintings, describing them, speculating on their meanings with lucidity and documenting their sales. The result is a book that, exhaustive in its research, will be a starting point for scholars and critics, but that will fail to engross casual readers. Conversely, readers already familiar with Gorky who are looking for political meanings to his suicide, shown here as undertaken in physical and marital distress, may find less than they are looking for. (July) Forecast: The Gorky of the film Ararat is an early Gorky, who paints in an autobiographically realist style. This book will find some readers looking for more than the movie gave them, but the lack of a forthcoming major Gorky retrospective is a drawback. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

For many years after he emigrated to America, surrealist painter Arshile Gorky (1904-48) continued his unsuccessful search for psychic refuge from the horrors of the Armenian genocide that scarred his youth. Much of his adulthood was a conscious fabrication, from concealing his nationality under a vaguely Slavic identity to plagiarized love letters and opinions. At his creative apex, Gorky developed a distinctive style of abstraction, influencing such followers as Willem de Kooning. But though for two decades he was part of the artistic avant-garde, his widespread fame occurred posthumously, after his lonely 1948 suicide by rope. Herrera, author of earlier bios of Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, illuminates Gorky's sad trajectory with a detailed and unsettling narrative. An improvement upon recent, less objective attempts to encapsulate this turbulent life by Nouritza Matossian (Black Angel), who was too sympathetic, and Matthew Spender (From a High Place), who is related to the artist by marriage, this is recommended for all libraries.-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A lucid life of the émigré Expressionist painter. Born in 1900 in eastern Turkey, Gorky regaled American friends with tales of an idyllic childhood among mountains and rivers. That much was true, as far as it went, though that paradise would be shattered by the onset of the Turkish war of genocide against ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire-and, though he claimed Russian descent and kinship with the writer Maxim Gorky, the man born Mooradian was Armenian through and through. Biographer and art historian Herrera (Matisse, 1993) spends a full hundred pages discussing the Armenian milieu that Gorky took pains not to remember before landing his subject, in 1920, in New York and thence Watertown, Massachusetts, where he lived in a neighborhood called Little Armenia and set about training himself as an artist. Gorky soon emerged as an apostle of European modernism, introducing his painting students to the works of his beloved Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque; and though his early work was clearly derivative, he soon developed a distinctive style that earned many admirers. As Herrera writes, Gorky was capable of bohemian excess, although he maintained higher standards of behavior than some of his comrades in art, especially the surrealists; as art patron Jeanne Reynal would recall, "He didn't understand the surrealists' fascination with sexual perversion." Though a dedicated family man and, by the early '40s, quite successful as an artist, Gorky suffered from his own demons, and the collapse of his marriage and calamities such as a studio fire that destroyed much of his archive helped lead him to suicide in 1948. Herrera's biography is competent and well-written, and, while it presupposesfamiliarity with major trends in modernist art and demands patience for sometimes unhelpful analysis ("We are not outside looking at the scenery but rather in the midst of stems, petals, leaves, branches, and twigs"), it serves its readers well. A welcome introduction to the work of a painter famed in his day but now largely forgotten.

Kirkus Reviews