Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
Tate Modern, until 3 May
Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World
Tate Modern, until 16 May
Arshile Gorky (1904–48) was a great and versatile painter, either the last major surrealist or the first Abstract Expressionist. In truth, he was a bit of each, an Armenian who fled to America where he became a focus of European influence and an innovator of considerable potency. André Breton called him ‘the eye-spring’, and wrote:
Gorky had the extreme sensitivity to be such a conducting wire, but his brief career was cut short by tragedy — a studio fire, cancer, a broken neck sustained in a car accident — and he committed suicide aged just 44.
I often wish that single-artist exhibitions catapulted the visitor right into the heart of the artist’s achievement, rather than insisting on the chronological approach. It would serve Gorky well to start in the middle. Although there are good things in all the early rooms, his remarkable ability to paraphrase others (which was how his own stylistic development proceeded) probably only serves to confuse most people: Picasso one minute, Miró the next. It’s almost a show to go through backwards, or at the very least to start at around Room 7. Here is a series of portraits Gorky made of his family, and particularly of himself and his mother, as displaced persons, with all the sorrows of the lost homeland welling in their eyes. These haunting images are unlike anything else he produced and were much reworked. Compare a painting from his early period, ‘Woman with a Palette’ (1927) in Room 2, that escaped this later reworking and retains a primitive purity. The best thing in the early rooms is an extraordinary series of large drawings in ink or graphite in Room 3.
The exhibition really gets going in Room 8, a corridor of works on paper made in the early 1940s when Gorky started to incorporate landscape into his images. One of the chief pleasures and revelations of this show is the drawings. The five works here, including ‘Study for the Liver in the Cock’s Comb’, are rich enough to merit a couple of hours’ study, and yet most people only glance at them en route to the paintings. Room 9 discloses a further revision for Gorky: a freer line and thin veils of paint. Here is a really beautiful and refreshingly subtle pair of paintings, ‘The Pirate’, I and II, the second of which, a gentle and resonant image, is perhaps my favourite picture in the whole show. Also here is ‘Hansatonic Falls’ (1943–4), which is composed in the looser, unfinished-looking handling that Gorky was so good at.
The landscape theme is pursued into Room 10, in such beguiling forms as the flooding, deliquescing colour of ‘One Year the Milkweed’, a study of flux if ever I saw one. Sometimes the imagery hardens into relentlessly sexualised forms, and in ‘Cornfield of Health’ there is something strident and even garish. Walking round this show, two thoughts dominated: a feeling of skeletons dancing at a feast, and a phrase — the tears of the soul. Moving into Room 11, I realised it was the colour combinations rather than the biomorphic forms which principally appealed, despite the inspired linearity. The smoky blue-greens and the lilac with a heart of gold, the smudges of red, the dark emphases. Again I preferred the least-worked images, the least frenetic — perhaps the unfinished, such as ‘Untitled’ of 1943–8 in Room 12 and ‘Painting’ (c.1943–7) in Room 10. Softer edges, less definition, more atmosphere.
The last Gorky show I saw was at the Whitechapel Gallery 20 years ago. I liked him then, though what I enjoy about his work has become more specific. He’s one of those artists who is known as a painters’ painter, but that doesn’t prevent mere mortals (i.e., non-painters) from responding to and even relishing his work, although it is subtle and painterly and achieves all sorts of marvellous effects of line and colour without seeming effort. He occupies a pivotal role in modern art, and de Kooning claimed him as his master. After London, the show travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (6 June to 20 September).
I want to make mention here of the Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde exhibition because it also is coming to an end and I may get no other chance. Sadly, there is no space to review it in depth. The first thing to say is that it’s a vast show of more than 450 works, and that you need stamina as well as enthusiasm to stay the course. Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) was a self-taught Dutch painter, architect, poet and theorist, who managed to be a Dadaist before founding the De Stijl movement in 1917, devoted to art, design and aesthetics. Mondrian was De Stijl’s most famous adherent, and both men evolved a mixture of mystical and scientific ideas to justify and explain their pure, unemotional, universal art.
But it was not always thus, as can be seen from Room 1 of this exhibition. This, for me, was the most exciting and unexpected room. Here we see van Doesburg experimenting with abstraction in such poignant and poetic images as the rounded hill-like pastel ‘Composition’ (1915), luminous as a Nolde watercolour, and the more angular but equally lovely ‘Tree’ (1916). That first room is a knockout, and after that the visitor’s attention has to be constantly directed to the labels, because the work you’re looking at is as likely to be by someone else as it is by van Doesburg. A shame really; I’d have liked to see a small retrospective devoted to him, making sense of his work alone. Perhaps this would have worked as a show within a show, with the context of the rest of the International Avant-Garde set around him. Instead, we have them all piled in together, in another chronological hang which is complicated and distracting, to put it kindly.
However, there are fabulous things here — Mondrian, masses of design (including furniture and typography), Dada (Ernst, Picabia, Schwitters), films, Moholy-Nagy and Helion. But only recommended for the energetic. Do not attempt to view both of these exhibitions in one session. Each deserves a fresh eye and mind, and visiting two shows of such magnitude and interest in one day is not doing them justice. Both come with catalogues: the Gorky a neat little hardback (£14.99) by Matthew Gale, the van Doesburg a more bulky paperback compendium (£24.99). Both are useful reference books but I do wonder how the conscientious gallery-goer manages: a new bookcase every year? I had to build a shed in the garden.
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