It’s 1924 in New York City. Thirty-four percent of the city’s residents are foreign-born. Among them is Arshile Gorky, fleeing the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks. Many passing through Ellis Island at this time are seeking another life—a better life—free of persecution and poverty. When Gorky arrives, he sets out to reinvent himself, changing his name, nationality, profession and personal history. And no wonder. His relatives had been raped, imprisoned and executed. His mother had died of starvation in his arms. When he arrives in the U.S. with his sister, he is ready to be anything other than what he has been running from the last 16-18 years of his life .
In the introduction to Arshile Gorky: New York City, published by Hauser & Wirth, editor Ben Easthman writes, “If Gorky is a great American painter it is at least in part because he, like New York City, is large, contradicts himself, contains multitudes.” The book is an exceptional document of Gorky’s brief life as an artist. It includes high-quality reproductions of his paintings and sketches, beginning in 1926 and continuing through his final works in 1948. He took his own life at the age of 44 or 46.
The book also contains multitudes. Throughout are black-and-white photographs by Berenice Abbott, giving readers a visual context for Gorky’s world. In 1929, Abbott moved to New York to create a photographic record of the city. Brand-new skyscrapers line the streets. Storefront signs read “HATS 1.95.” There are photos of Union Square, Wall Street, Broome Street—all captured by Abbott. There are also photographs of Gorky with his artwork, his wife and two daughters, his friends and his Union Square studio. This is Gorky’s New York—where he became close with Willem de Kooning and Stuart Davis, held exhibitions and created astonishing work.
Five essays round out this thorough examination of the enigmatic artist. Scholar Christa Noel Robbins examines Gorky’s fabulation and offers important insights into appropriation and originality, noting that “The question of origins was among the key issues being mulled over by artists and critics in the 1920s and 1930s.” Gorky studied Picasso, Uccello and de Chirico with intensity. “There is nothing more vulgar and incompetent than originality,” Picasso said. Robbins writes that originality is “the product of repetition,” and shows how Gorky’s repetition of compositions and elements lifted from other artists demonstrates “just how wide-reaching was Gorky’s use and reuse of appropriated elements.” All art is lineage—embedded in every artist, whether consciously or not.
Art historian Emily Warner contributes an essay on Gorky’s murals—his “flattened compositions of industrial motifs.” He created murals for the Newark Airport Administration Building and the Aviation Building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He believed “Mural paintings should not become part of the wall, because the moment is lost and the painting loses its identity.” To him, murals should not merge with architecture. Dazzling color studies of these murals appear throughout the book. Warner writes that Gorky’s murals “detach from their surroundings—to float away from them, visually and psychically, and thus become uncommon… an estranged thing, another world, a form that arrests the viewer and forces a change in her perception.”
Tamar Kharatishvili, also an art historian, details Gorky’s lifelong self-invention. “He saw no problem with blending fact and fiction, in constructing myths and stories about his own biography, his artistic training, his place of birth, or his ethnic origins.” She also explores his innovations in painting techniques and materials. In 1937, he delivered a lecture on camouflage at the American Federation of Arts in Washington, D.C. How perfect.
The Remake, an essay by artist and writer Allison Katz, describes how she, at barely 20 years old, sat as a model for an artist while staring at the Gorky painting, Still Life, 1935-36, which Katz nicknamed ‘The TV.’ In those long modeling sessions while holding a pose, she came to understand that “you can’t disregard a painting when making or looking at a painting. The way paint adheres is the image.” While looking at Still Life, she asks herself, “What would it mean to settle down inside that painting, the one I didn’t choose; to be a devoted audience? Why this painting in particular? Fate.”
The final essay is by New Yorker writer and novelist Adam Gopnik, who connects Gorky’s work to the city itself. “His art is busy, busy as New York is busy, busy as his mind is busy.” Many of Gorky’s works, Gopnik argues, are prescient not of what comes immediately after him, “but what comes after what comes after: the pictures of a Helen Frankenthaler or a Jules Olitski.”
Arshile Gorky: New York City honors not just the artist, but art itself—and all artists. It can be read as a guide for emerging artists and a window into the lucid mind of a great one. Out of trauma, Gorky rewrote his life to make great paintings. In doing so, as the book aptly demonstrates, he made himself an original.
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