February 12th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Both serious and surprising, this new retrospective looks at the work of an artist famous for his swirls of colour and spectral shapes
This is the kind of exhibition Tate Modern should put on all the time – a serious, sensitive and eye-opening encounter with a great modern artist.
Arshile Gorky was one of a generation of artists in 1930s New York who were fed by Roosevelt's New Deal while they studied the works of the European modern movement in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, these painters were opening themselves to a Jungian unconscious of mythic forms; by around 1950, they were becoming famous for abstract, wall-filling visions of sublime mystery.
But by the time Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists broke the ice, Gorky was dead. He killed himself in 1948, with his painting still in the movement's intermediate phase of development, not yet purely abstract; his tearpools of paintings swim with psychic metaphors and spectral shapes, shards of figures, washes of landscape.
The achievement of this exhibition is to reveal that – far from being unresolved – these are among the monuments of American art. They flow and burst with life, evoking waterfalls in drips of thin green and orange paint. The talent that enabled Gorky to perfectly ape Cézanne in an early still life makes his poetic dreams of the 1940s formidably sharp. These are not vague shimmers, like Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, but scarily real encounters with monsters and memories, made real in jagged black lines that stab through swirls of colour. These colours are by turns harshly hot and mercifully cool, and flow with a captivating freedom.
In the two versions of his portrait The Artist and His Mother, Gorky himself faces you: a boy lost in time with his mother, who died in Turkey's Armenian genocide at the end of the first world war. His canvases return obsessively to his childhood by Lake Van, as they strive manfully to create a place for a displaced heart.
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February 10th, 2010 William Feaver
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver
Jackson Pollock was carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?
Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."
In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.
He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car accident.
Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.
As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.
He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.
Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.
Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.
In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.
Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."
Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.
Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.
"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.
"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.
Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."
"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."
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February 8th, 2010 Skye Sherwin, Robert Clark
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva/Clare Rojas, Birmingham
A first and very welcome UK exhibition of the work of renowned Lisbon-based duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. Gusmão and Paiva present silent films which come across as strange poetic ponderings; austere landscapes are stage sets for distinctly absurd rituals. Elsewhere, deserts are focused in disorientating slow motion or multiple exposure; a man observes the sky through a hole in his shoe; and a stone skimming across a lake takes on the slow grace of planetary movement. Influenced by the "recreational metaphysics" of the innovative Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa, the work is both melancholic in mood and generously playful in spirit. The installation is here accompanied by American artist Clare Rojas's mock-naif painterly reveries.
Ikon Gallery, to 21 Mar
Robert Clark
Charles Avery, London
A Charles Avery exhibition is never short on wow factor. He has dedicated his life to realising a world in his head called The Island, in drawings, sculpture and text. There have been looming, bald-headed, elephant-nosed monsters; two-headed cobras; and a taxidermy anomaly with a wolf's head, llama's body and giant chicken feet. His nuances of character turn these playful journeys into something truly compelling. This latest instalment features Avery's largest drawing yet. Covering an entire gallery wall, it depicts the port town of Onomatopoeia, gateway to The Island and a bustling introduction to Avery's unique vision.
Pilar Corrias, W1, Fri to 31 Mar
Skye Sherwin
The Walls Are Talking, Manchester
The Whitworth permanent collection houses an internationally acclaimed collection of wallpapers. With this exhibition of wallpaper works by renowned contemporary fine artists, the gallery sets its collection within a less reassuring context. Wallpapers are taken to be innately comforting, so here an array of artists – including Sonia Boyce, Damien Hirst and AA Bronson – tend to infiltrate the niceties of the medium with hints of domestic confusion and conflict. The wilfully eccentric work of Niki de St Phalle never did have much truck with familial sobriety, while Robert Gober's work introduces violence into domestic suburbia in a similar gleeful spirit to the films of David Lynch.
Whitworth Art Gallery, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Destroy All Monsters, London
When Destroy All Monsters played their first gig at a comics convention they were shunted off after 10 minutes, yet 30 years on, the Michigan noiseniks exert a cult magnetism. The band began with frontwoman Niagara; Carey Loren, co-curator of this exhibition of their archive with James Hoff; and artists Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley. The Stooges' Ron Asheton and one-time MC5 bassist Michael Davis later joined, steering DAM's aggressive mix of sci-fi and psychedelic rock in a more punk direction. Here, posters, fliers, drawings, magazines and records testify to their unruly energy.
Space, E8, to 20 Feb
Skye Sherwin
Jordan Baseman, Gateshead
Through misalignments of film fragments and interview voiceover, Jordan Baseman sets up a series of portraits that leave you with an uneasy sense of the fragilities of self-identity. Insider Man juxtaposes the bragging of a gangster conman with an innocent-looking 1977 film of a beautiful young woman dancing with her friends. Nasty Piece Of Stuff contrasts speedy film fragments of present-day Soho nightlife with plaintive accounts of the 1960s gay scene. The use of talking heads is an innately convincing technique that Baseman deliberately undermines with reconstructed images from archival footage.
BALTIC, to 9 May
Robert Clark
Dexter Dalwood, St Ives
Dexter Dalwood's paintings are full of absent ghosts. Some are well known, like Sharon Tate, who haunts the white couch and blood-orange decor in his rendering of an empty 1960s living room; others less so. Brighton pier, seen via a ragged window, could be the daily view of the IRA's 1984's Grand Hotel bomber; it's an era channelled in a pink and blue shellsuit palette. This is history painting, reinvigorated by way of a subjective lens. It's with this personal, collagist approach that Dalwood has selected works from the Tate Collection, shown alongside a survey of his own paintings. References to the moon landings, the Rolling Stones and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs collide with works by Picasso, Howard Hodgkin, Roger Hilton and more. They're all dated to 1971, the year Dalwood turned 11, and make for an energetically bumpy ride through the cultural currents and political upheavals of the recent past.
Tate St Ives, to 3 May
Skye Sherwin
Shona Illingworth, Wolverhampton
Shona Illingworth's film Balkaniel is a study of the remote area in the Scottish Highlands in which she grew up. Yet, far from an autobiographical study, the work evokes varieties of collective cultural memory, the contrasting ways in which different inhabitants of the landscape identify with its idiosyncratic character and atmosphere. As the artist says, "For the locals, this area is the centre of the world, for the military it was the frontline, and for the 'incomers' it is the edge of the world." A silent sequence of RAF bombing is set against the natural grandeur of a stormy sea, while a lone adolescent girl is filmed wandering the deserted landscape like a forlorn sleepwalker. It's a moody and moving work.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, to 1 May
Robert Clark
Arshile Gorky, London
Arshile Gorky is remembered as one of abstract expressionism's frontrunners. Yet the canvases he is most celebrated for only emerged in the last few years of his short, sad life. Delving into troubled memories of his Armenian homeland, his rich, earthy palette is full of burnt oranges and mustard yellows, washed-out greens and smudgy browns, while his abstracted forms judder from the lush to the twisted. His artistic career was something of an impersonation act. Embodying the American myth of reinvention, he escaped persecution from the Turks, claiming to be a celebrated European artist on arrival in the States. There he learned to paint, emulating the styles of others, assuming the guises of impressionism, cubism, surrealism and more. In this retrospective, what could have felt like a crash course in cultural history reveals a drawn-out artistic evolution, full of curious contradictions and creative leaps.
Tate Modern, SE1, Wed to 3 May
Skye Sherwin
• This article was amended on 8 February 2010. In the original the details for the Arshile Gorky exhibition previewed above stated that the show takes place at Tate Britain, SW1 - it actually takes place at Tate Modern, SE1. This has been corrected.
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