By Michael FitzGerald
No institution has been as important to Arshile Gorky's career and his posthumous reputation as the Whitney Museum of American Art. This statement might puzzle those accustomed to conceiving the Whitney as the defender of a largely representational, home-grown art against the more abstract departures of the international avant-garde. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gorky was by far the most European-oriented among the leading American artists, both because of his ceaseless devotion to his native Armenian culture and his profound aesthetic allegiance to the art of Picasso, Miró, and other contemporary European masters. Perhaps the clearest demonstration that Gorky had earned a place alongside these Europeans was his selection by André Breton, in 1945, as the foremost American recruit to the international Surrealist movement.1
Why did the Whitney
become the protector and promoter of this most foreign of American artists?
How did the Whitney's support help shape Gorky's life? And how, more than
fifty years after Gorky's suicide in 1948, does the Whitney influence our
understanding of his contribution to art history? Thanks to the extensive
archives assembled by the Museum since its founding in 1931, these questions
can be explored in rich and fascinating detail. Among the hundreds of pages
preserved at the Whitney—formal correspondence, private curatorial
judgments, deeply personal letters, and many other types of records—are
documents so revealing that we can chart Gorky's career from the 1930s through
the decade following his death. What emerges is not only a tangible record
of his work, but also a vivid evocation of an older New York art community,
whose small size, economic fragility, and shaky aesthetic assurance differed
so fundamentally from our own and determined the obdurate environment of
Gorky's relationship with the Whitney. The Whitney's formal
relationship with Gorky began in 1935, when three of his paintings were
exhibited in a large group show. Subsequently, his work appeared almost
yearly in Whitney Annuals or Biennials through his death in 1948; that year's
Annual included a drawing from the Betrothal series.2
These exhibition opportunities, and the Whitney's crucial purchase of Painting
(1936-37), provided rare and important outlets for Gorky in his lifetime.
But it was the Whitney's posthumous attention to his achievement that defined
the Museum as the primary guardian of his reputation. In 1951, the Whitney
mounted the first Gorky retrospective and six years later published the
first monograph on his work. Both of these landmark events resulted from
the personal dedication of a sympathetic curator, Lloyd Goodrich (who oversaw
the exhibition), and a devoted patron, Ethel Schwabacher (who helped organize
the retrospective and wrote the monograph). They were the driving forces
behind the Museum's support of Gorky, and their papers relating to the retrospective
and monograph constitute the most significant portion of the Whitney's archive
on the artist.Yet the archival record
is not only a story of one promising artist and a supportive museum. It
also preserves in sharp definition the important role Gorky played in the
rise to prominence of the Abstract Expressionist generation and the tremendous
respect these artists—Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner,
Barnett Newman, and many others—had for Gorky's artistic achievements,
as they struggled to establish their own careers. In many ways, the history
of the Whitney's relationship with Gorky expands far beyond a single artist's
career to embrace the struggle for the acceptance of avant-garde art in
America. Early Support: An Inauspicious Beginning
In the fall of 1937, Gorky filled out a brief form [Fig. 1] accepting "the invitation of the Whitney Museum of American Art to exhibit in: 1937 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting." The series, the predecessor of the current Biennials, was the major showcase for the work of American artists, and this was the second year in a row that Gorky had been offered the chance to show his new paintings.
In his handwritten
responses to routine questions, Gorky sketched a self-portrait that mixes
facts with extravagant fabrications and frank disclosures of his high ambition
but marginal success after more than a decade's effort to establish his
career in New York. In the 1937 response, Gorky, using his professional
rather than his family name (Vosdanig Adoian), shifted his birthplace from
the village of Khorkum on the shores of Lake Van in eastern Turkey to the
better-known Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgian Russia. And he salted his rudimentary
education in art schools in Boston and New York with a stint in Providence,
Rhode Island (elsewhere he claimed, quite fabulously, to have studied engineering
at Brown University). If Gorky embroidered
his past, he left his present entirely threadbare. For the past twelve years,
the 1937 response continues, he had worked in New York City, and he currently
lived at 36 Union Square, on the northern edge of Greenwich Village. He
had no telephone. Although some of his work could be seen at the Boyer Gallery,
most of it remained in his studio. (It was generally known that appointments
with Gorky could be arranged by letter or simply by climbing the stairs
and knocking on his door.) Asked to list any prizes or awards he had received,
Gorky inscribed a hopeful, "Not as yet," and used the innocuous category
of "additional data" to record his efforts: "Have submitted works in every
important exhibition of contemporary American and European art in New York
City...Taught seven years at Grand Central Art School." Such data signal that
at this point Gorky had not achieved any measurable success. Although Alfred
H. Barr, Jr., had included his work in a 1930 exhibition at The Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA), Gorky had only a handful of shows in galleries during
the first half of the decade and hardly any sales or public praise. In 1935,
however, his luck began to turn. Two curators at the Whitney, Hermon More
and Karl Free, chose three of Gorky's paintings for a large exhibition,
"Abstract Painting in America," [Fig.
2] and reproduced one in the catalogue. Opening more than a year before
Barr's better-known "Cubism and Abstract Art" at MoMA, the Whitney's show
presented approximately 125 paintings, watercolors, and drawings, primarily
by established American artists such as Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Stuart
Davis, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The catalogue featured an essay by Davis championing
diverse approaches to abstraction against the realism of American Scene
painting.3 Gorky, one of the least-known
artists in the Whitney's "Abstract Painting in America," may have felt that
this recognition by the leading museum of American art established his importance.
He certainly acted important at a symposium the Museum held in conjunction
with the exhibition, when he admonished the speakers: "You must analyze
abstract art the way you analyze a fugue by Bach." He then elaborated at
length. The moderator, Lloyd Goodrich (who was then a research curator at
the Whitney), later recounted: "I didn't understand what he was talking
about then, so I thought he was being facetious, but of course he was serious.
I didn't get what he was saying, and I told him to sit down. He was right,
and I was wrong. I never should have talked like that to an artist—I've
always felt badly about it."4
This sense of honesty
transformed Goodrich, who was already a leading force at the Museum (in
1958 he became director), into the artist's most ardent supporter among
museum curators. In 1936, Gorky showed one of his finest early paintings,
Organization [Fig.
3], at the Whitney's "Third Biennial of Contemporary American Painting."
That year, the Museum decided not to award prizes, which implied a hierarchy,
but instead to create an annual purchase fund of $20,000, part of which
would be used to buy works hung in its exhibitions. The following year's
Annual included Gorky's Painting [Fig.
4] (1936-37), one of the Whitney's first purchases from the new fund.
In two years, Gorky
had risen out of obscurity—one of his paintings had been bought by
a major museum, the first such purchase of his career (and among his rare
sales during these Depression years). On October 18, 1937, Gorky wrote to
his sister, Vartoosh, "I have a painting in the current exhibition at the
Whitney Museum, which is to purchase paintings worth some $20,000.00. Mine
is priced very reasonably. If only they would buy it. I should be able to
help father, and what is more I could pay you a visit on Christmas."5
Although the Museum announced the purchase in early December [Fig.
5], Gorky postponed his trip. On January 1, 1938, he delivered the good
news: "The Whitney Museum purchased one of my paintings for 650.00. I am
to get the check on the fourth."6
[Fig. 6]
In fact, the museum paid $663 for Painting, versus $612 for Café
by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, $816 for Twenty-Cent Movie by Reginald Marsh,
and $7,650 for The Bridal Path, White Mountains, a major oil
by Winslow Homer.7 Yet,
compared to the $4,590 paid for Eugene Speicher's Marianna, Gorky's
picture was cheap. Except for 1938-39,
Gorky appeared almost annually (sometimes twice annually) in exhibitions
held at the Museum, and Lloyd Goodrich became a highly respected judge of
his work. Although primarily remembered for his scholarly monographs on
Homer and Thomas Eakins and as a champion of twentieth-century realist art,
Goodrich was admired by his contemporaries for his appreciation of a wide
range of artists. When Barr took a leave from his post as director of MoMA
in 1932, he chose Goodrich to replace him, although the appointment never
transpired.8 By the early
forties, Barr relied on Goodrich to alert him to changes in Gorky's art.
As Barr admitted, he
had lost interest in Gorky's work during the 1930s. "I remember hearing
of Gorky late in 1929, the autumn our Museum opened its doors. I recall
going to his studio early in 1930. I was impressed immediately by Arshile's
seriousness as an artist and his charm as a person. I think I went back
again shortly afterwards to pick out some paintings for our show, An
Exhibition of Work of 46 Painters and Sculptors Under 35 Years of Age....During
subsequent years I saw him occasionally but to be candid was somewhat put
off by his dependence on painters of the School of Paris, such as Matisse,
Picasso and Miró. In spite of his derivative styles, one felt grateful
for his studies of abstract and semi-abstract painting during a decade which
was given over largely to social realism and the American scene." Indeed,
the Whitney's Painting responds directly to Picasso's still lifes
of the early 1930s and represents a period in Gorky's art when, as he remarked
to his friend, the painter Balcomb Greene, "I feel Picasso running in my
finger tips."9 This instance
of the Whitney's support for European influence on American art, when Barr
(speaking for the Modern) rejected it, overturns conventional conceptions
of each institution's patronage and confirms Goodrich's devotion to Gorky's
art despite the nationalistic doctrines that dominated American art in the
1930s. Apparently, Goodrich
also played a crucial role in the Modern's first purchase of a painting
by Gorky. The Whitney's 1941 Annual had included one of Gorky's new series,
Garden in Sochi [Fig.
7], which in many ways marked the maturation of his art as he moved
beyond the influence of Picasso and Miró to draw more deeply on his
Armenian heritage. As reported by Matthew Spender, Gorky's biographer and
son-in-law, Goodrich recognized the departure and sent word to Barr: "Six
months after Lloyd Goodrich had exhibited the green Garden in Sochi,
Alfred Barr appeared at Gorky's studio to have a look at it. As he crossed
the threshold he said, 'Goodrich tells me you have painted your best painting.'
Gorky took it out and put it on the easel. Barr's comment was one unemphatic
word: "Yes.'"10 The Generosity of Friends
In order to acquire Garden in Sochi, MoMA returned to Gorky a painting it had been given the previous year by Wolfgang and Ethel Schwabacher, Khorkum (c. 1938). MoMA had received Khorkum in 1941, along with Argula (c. 1938-39), from the Philadelphia collector Bernard Davis. Both Davis and the Schwabachers were private collectors who had supported Gorky through the difficult years of the 1930s and were trying to broaden his audience by placing his paintings in public collections as his reputation slowly grew.
Without the support
of a small group of wealthy admirers, Gorky would probably have been unable
to persist as a painter long enough to gain the recognition that began at
the Whitney in the mid-1930s. From 1933 to 1941, his only steady source
of income was a modest stipend from the Public Works of Art Project. By
purchasing a few drawings or paintings, making gifts of clothing, food,
or cash, or discreetly arranging a grant, these individuals were the financial
bedrock of Gorky's adult life, and frequently his most enthusiastic critics
as well. At a time when the
art world was dominated by men, most of Gorky's patrons were women—in
addition to Schwabacher, there were Jeanne Reynal and Mina Metzger. Jeanne
Reynal was a mosaicist who not only bought Gorky's paintings over the years,
but also was instrumental in arranging a small exhibition of his work at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in August 1941; at that time, she
donated Enigmatic Combat (c. 1936-37) to the museum. Mina Metzger
paid Gorky for painting lessons [Fig.
8] during 1934-35, and Ethel Schwabacher was a pupil during this time
as well—the only other private student he took. Ethel Schwabacher,
along with her husband Wolfgang (known as Wolf), were, without question,
Gorky's most devoted and enduring patrons. Born in New York City in 1903
to a wealthy Jewish family, Ethel led an extremely independent, bohemian
life in the 1920s and early 1930s—studying sculpture, undergoing psychoanalysis,
and running through a string of lovers, usually other artists or intellectuals.
In the late 1920s, she moved to the south of France to pursue painting,
and also traveled widely through Europe. Soon after her return to New York
in the early 1930s, she met Wolfgang Schwabacher, a young partner in the
law firm of Hays, Wolf, Kaufman & Schwabacher. Their marriage in 1935 enabled
Ethel to become an active patron even as she continued to paint.11
Ethel's career as a
painter probably brought her to Goodrich's attention, but their shared admiration
for Gorky's art ultimately shaped them into a curatorial team. Thanks to
a memorandum Goodrich wrote after a conversation with her on February 14,
1957, we have a record [Fig.
9] of how Ethel met Gorky and how their friendship grew. She recalled
first encountering Gorky in 1928, through a friend who was studying with
him at the Grand Central School of Art, but did not get to know him until
she returned from Paris and began studying with him in January 1934. Except
for a hiatus over the summer, during the following year or so Schwabacher
and Metzger spent three days a week, three hours a day in Gorky's studio
or in his company at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they would look
at Old Master paintings. After her formal training ended, Ethel visited
Gorky constantly; she told Goodrich that she saw every picture he painted,
and he saw every one she made before his death. Equally important to Gorky's
future, she became a close friend of Agnes Magruder [Fig.
10], whom he married in September 1941. As Goodrich recorded,
Ethel "spoke about Gorky's terrible poverty; that often he was afraid to
answer a knock on his door for fear that it was the landlord to evict him.
From the beginning she tried to help him financially, always by buying pictures,
usually drawings. She said that Wolf was always most generous about this,
and always made Gorky feel that the money was given because of the quality
of his work. Wolf also took care of Gorky's legal problems." A note [Fig.
11] from Wolf to Gorky, dated May 28, 1937, confirms the truth of these
recollections: "You are, we feel, a great painter and some day you will
come into your own. In the interim, we know you will carry on with your
usual courage and high hope." The Schwabachers had just agreed to purchase
a large painting for $650 (a price approximately equal to the Whitney's
recent payment), and at the bottom of the letter, Wolf scribbled a postscript:
"I'll send it $50 a month, if that's alright with you." (This amounted to
nearly half of the $103.40 Gorky received each month from the WPA.) The
painting was Khorkum, which the Schwabachers later gave to the Modern
and Gorky accepted as partial payment for Garden in Sochi. Gorky's slowly rising
reputation in the 1930s did him little financial good, and Wolf continued
to find creative ways to help the artist pay his bills, such as arranging
a grant for $1,000 in 1946 from The New-Land Foundation, an organization,
headed by Wolf, founded to aid refugees from World War II. Gorky benefited
from the wartime diaspora in another way when the Surrealist émigré
André Breton became acquainted with him in New York and took up his
work as the newest addition to Surrealism. This endorsement by a pillar
of avant-garde culture, along with the growing support shown by the Whitney
and MoMA, convinced Julien Levy to become Gorky's dealer and present four
one-artist shows during 1945-48. The increasing presence
of Gorky's work in exhibitions at galleries and museums around New York
generated critical discussion and transformed Gorky from a painter long-known
to art world insiders into a familiar public figure. Without question, the
foremost critic was Clement Greenberg, who gave Gorky a very stern welcome
in a March 1945 review of Levy's inaugural exhibition. "Although to my knowledge
Arshile Gorky is having his first one-man show, he is by no means a fledgling
painter....From the first there has been no question about the level of
his art...." Yet Greenberg quickly undercut this respectful appreciation
by charging that Gorky's current work was a sell-out to fashionable taste.
Made primarily during the previous years, the paintings on view were the
most improvisational and thinly brushed that Gorky had produced. "This new
turn...does make his work less serious and less powerful and emphasizes
the dependent nature of his inspiration." (The issue of dependence on other
artists' work dogged Gorky throughout his career). "What this means is that
Gorky has at last taken the easy way out—corrupted perhaps by the example
of the imported surrealists and such neo-romantics as Tchelitchew...perhaps
this is his true self and true level." Rather like Goodrich's
inauspicious public encounter with Gorky in 1935, this devastating review
turned Greenberg into one of the artist's most dedicated promoters. In December
1948, five months after Gorky's death, Greenberg replied to a letter from
Wolf with a private apology. [Fig.
12] "I did not review Gorky's 1947 show of drawings, but I did cover
his 1945 show, in The Nation of March 24, 1945—and now regret
a good many of the things I said then, largely out of pedantry." In the
intervening years, Greenberg had publicly praised Gorky's newest work, particularly
as it appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney. Reviewing the 1947 Annual
for The Nation, he proclaimed, "Arshile Gorky's large 'The Calendars'
is the best painting in the exhibition and one of the best pictures ever
done by an American." And in 1948, he eulogized both Gorky and the Whitney's
long-standing support of his art. "The presence of the late Arshile Gorky,
one of the two or three genuinely important artists the Whitney showed enough
discernment to invite to its annuals year after year, is greatly missed.
Last year his magnificent 'Calendars' practically blotted out the rest of
the show...."A Memorial Exhibition
Greenberg's 1948 postcard to Wolf Schwabacher was evidently a response to an inquiry Schwabacher had made about reviews of a Gorky exhibition. The Schwabachers' efforts to document Gorky's life and career had been going on for a decade and would eventually consume Ethel's energy as well as produce the two most significant events of Gorky's posthumous career—the Whitney's retrospective, in 1951, and her monograph, published by the Whitney in 1957. Perhaps Gorky's fragile health was at the back of Ethel's mind when, in the spring of 1948, she conceived the idea of writing a book on Gorky. Certainly, his recent years had been punctuated by tragedies. In January 1946, a fire had destroyed the barn which served as his studio in Connecticut, where he and his family had moved to reduce expenses; more than two dozen of his paintings went up in flames. The following month, he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and underwent a colostomy, which left him physically limited and mentally depressed.
By Ethel's own account,
it was Wolf who first suggested she write about art. John Marin, however,
was the artist he had in mind. Ethel chose Gorky—both because of her
personal knowledge of his work and her strong belief that he deserved greater
recognition. As Goodrich recalled, [Fig.
9] "It was then that she and Wolf came to see me, evidently partly in
order to assure Wolf (and perhaps herself?) that the project was worth doing.
I remember that they wanted my opinion about this, and also advice about
how to go about it. I remember distinctly how thrilled she was at the idea;
and that I said I thought it was an excellent idea and well worth doing."
Goodrich, however, did far more than bless the project. Since Ethel had
never written for publication, he served as editor, finally becoming so
deeply involved that, as Ethel readily acknowledged, he should have been
credited as a co-author. Initially, Ethel expected
Gorky's full involvement. "Ethel said that Gorky was much pleased with the
idea," Goodrich recounted, "and thought she was just the person to write
the book; he said: 'Ethel, you are a poet.' It was arranged that Agnes would
make notes on things that Gorky said. Ethel herself was to make notes; but
she said she actually did not, because she was so entranced with listening
to Gorky....Then came the succession of tragic events which led up to Gorky's
death." (In addition to the fire in his studio and cancer surgery in 1946,
Gorky suffered a broken neck from a car crash in June of 1948.) By the end
of 1949, the biography had been postponed in favor of the retrospective,
which Goodrich and Schwabacher then began to organize for the Whitney. As the first full-scale
exhibition of Gorky's work ever held and the first major show to follow
his death, the Whitney's retrospective benefited from the complete support
of everyone who had been close to Gorky, particularly his dealer, Julien
Levy, and his widow, Agnes. This cooperation was essential since most of
Gorky's paintings remained in his estate. Yet the situation began to change
soon after his death as both the Whitney and the Modern, in particular,
acquired key works. In 1948, MoMA purchased Agony (1947), a painting
that Barr felt was "perhaps [Gorky's] best painting" and had selected for
the museum before the artist's death, although he had agreed to leave it
in Levy's hands. The Whitney acquired
three major pieces in anticipation of the exhibition. The Schwabachers donated
Study for Summation (1946) [Fig.
13], a drawing whose title suggests its accumulation of imagery and
heavily worked surface. In December 1949, Levy called Goodrich to offer
[Fig. 14] the
Whitney the most polished of the two versions of The Artist and his Mother
(1926-36) [Fig.
15]. Arguably Gorky's masterpiece, this painting is based on a photograph
of the young Gorky and his mother, taken in 1912, before the Turkish massacre
of Armenians during World War I, when Gorky, his mother, and his sister
were sent on a death march. His mother never recovered her health; she died
in 1919 and the fifteen-year-old Gorky emigrated to America. Perhaps because
of this deeply personal content, Agnes urged Levy to give rather than sell
the painting to the Whitney. In April 1950, the Museum also purchased the
highly detailed version of Betrothal
(1947) [Fig.
16] from a dealer, Sam Kootz, for $1,000. Having these two outstanding
paintings in its Permanent Collection enabled the Whitney to present Gorky's
finest achievements at both the beginning and the end of his career. The Whitney's courage
in mounting the exhibition is evident from the refusals it received from
other museums that were devoted to innovative art but thought a full retrospective
of Gorky's work would be beyond their audiences. Two leading directors,
Perry Rathbone of the Saint Louis Museum of Art and James S. Plaut of the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, expressed great disappointment at
having to decline. Plaut offered his "very sincere personal regret" and
explained: [Fig.
17] "I had thought that our answer would be different; the reasons for
our failure to participate have nothing to do with the quality of the man's
work or lack of confidence in the fine selection which you will make for
the Whitney exhibition. It is, rather, that in the opinion of our Executive
Committee the Boston public has not yet reached the degree of sophistication
which makes it possible for the Institute to display a full scale projection
of abstract painting by one man. I fear that the subtle nuances which distinguish
each of Gorky's paintings from another are lost, as far as our public is
concerned, on all but a few of the initiated." Ultimately, only the Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which
had hosted a small Gorky show in 1941) took the exhibition. "Arshile Gorky: Memorial
Exhibition" [Fig.
18] opened at the Whitney on January 5, 1951, with fifty-five oils,
three gouaches, and thirty-six drawings, presenting the full range of Gorky's
work from 1922 through 1948. All the participants acknowledged [Fig.
19] that the show was a collaborative effort led by Schwabacher and
Goodrich. They chose to include thirty-one paintings from the 1940s, thereby
placing greatest emphasis on Gorky's last eight years. In her essay for
the catalogue, Schwabacher described the late work as a triumph of both
complex, profoundly personal imagery and masterly handling of the medium—"These
works revealed him in full possession of his means,...the greatest alla
prima painter this country has produced." If this was a grand claim,
Schwabacher's most memorable phrase wed Gorky's technical virtuosity with
a hotly contested source of inspiration: "It might be said of him that he
was the Ingres of the unconscious." Neither Goodrich's
introduction nor Schwabacher's lengthy essay make any explicit acknowledgment
of the debates that then swirled around Gorky and the artists who were already
being called Abstract Expressionists. To their credit, the authors focused
on Gorky's relationship to historical art and his individual achievements.
They did not use Gorky's work to advocate abstraction—the issue Plaut's
executive committee found so problematic (as did many others at the time)—or
to promote the apparent spontaneity of execution many found offensive in
the work of de Kooning and Pollock, among others. (Schwabacher's use of
the old term alla prima suggests a mixture of immediacy and discipline
quite unlike Pollock's technique of pouring paint from a can.) Yet their
emphasis on Gorky's late paintings, and Schwabacher's suggestion that the
unconscious was at the center of his art, framed Gorky's achievement in
controversy. Robert M. Coates stated
the situation most directly in his review of the exhibition for The New
Yorker. "This [exhibition] represents a step of some sort—possibly
a significant one—for in addition to the accolade thus bestowed on
Gorky himself, it is the first time a member of the abstract-Expressionist
group [sic], which Gorky in his lifetime more or less headed, has been so
honored officially." And he told readers that the exhibition "offers about
the best opportunity we have yet had to study in any detail the processes
by which a member of this still controversial group got, so to speak, that
way." As this phrasing suggests, Coates was not very sympathetic to Gorky's
art; he found a "lack of substance" and concluded that it "will prove as
evanescent as the flowers he painted"—making the art sound almost amateurish.
While some reviews
were more admiring, the most dismissive one drew the greatest attention
and sparked genuine outrage in the art community. In the January 7 issue
of the New York Herald Tribune, Emily Genauer published a vicious
attack [Fig.
20]. Describing the exhibition as a "spectacle of his near-canonization
by a small but influential group of art-world impresarios," she compared
the acclaim Gorky was receiving with the case of Jackson Pollock—"Well,
it's going to be Gorky now, kids, and Pollack [sic] might just as well move
over and make room for him." While her misspelling betrayed her ignorance,
Genauer showed no hesitation in condemning Gorky's art as "a blatant parroting
of some one else's style," and the exhibition as "a high-pressure post-mortem
promotion program." She concluded, "I'm beginning to think that the only
thing worse than the idolatry of second-rate artists while they're living
is idolatry of them after they're dead." Anyone knowledgeable
about Gorky's life would be appalled by this suggestion of commercialism,
either while he was alive or in the two years after his death. The few who
had been close to him since the thirties, particularly Jeanne Reynal, Mina
Metzger, and the Schwabachers, were so offended that they signed an open
letter Metzger wrote to the Tribune. The letter [Fig.
21] accused Genauer of unprofessionalism because she did not seriously
address Gorky's art and showed no sympathy for his difficult life: "This
is a piece of savage presumption and callousness that Gorky's friends resent...."
Although the Tribune did not publish it, the letter became a wide-scale
protest which drew sixty-nine signatures—including most of the respected
artists in New York—and came close to being printed in Art News,
then the leading magazine of contemporary art. Only the editors' unwillingness
to criticize another publication stopped it. The response stemmed
not only from Genauer's misguided attack on the art world but also from
her judgment that posthumously Gorky had become a paradigm for advanced
art in New York. In a more friendly fashion, Coates had pointed out the
same thing when he said that Gorky had been the leader of Abstract Expressionism
during his lifetime. In fact, this characterization was entirely inaccurate.
Even though he had been a close friend of Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning
in the thirties and had lived in Greenwich Village, where he often encountered
Pollock and other contemporaries, Gorky had always been a loner, isolated
by a proud temperament and strong attachment to his Armenian heritage. As
a painter, he prized craftsmanship—even in the depths of the Depression
he was famous for his hoard of paints and brushes. In later years, he explicitly
rejected the dismissal of aesthetics espoused by the Surrealists and shared
by some of the American artists associated with Abstract Expressionism.
Following his death, however, the individuality of Gorky's approach temporarily
faded. The coincidence of his suicide with the conception of Abstract Expressionism
enabled contemporaries to redefine his reputation and enlist both his art
and his poignant life as cardinal images of the new movement. The outpouring of support
for Metzger's letter to the Tribune confirms that Gorky had become
a lightning rod for contemporary criticism. The list of signatories reads
like a roll call of the New York School. After Gorky's old friend, Jeanne
Reynal, it fills with artists who were far from Gorky's intimates but who
were then fighting to establish their own reputations: in order of signature,
Lee Krasner, Herbert Ferber, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett
Newman, as well as James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Jack Tworkov, Willem de Kooning,
Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and Philip Guston, to name only a dozen.
Although the heavy penstrokes of Pollock's signature dominate the first
sheet, the following four sheets are scattered with the signatures of artists
who had already achieved a respected position in American art—Yasuo
Kuniyoshi, George L.K. Morris, Charmion von Wiegand, and Hans Hofmann (for
unknown reasons, Stuart Davis did not participate). Dealers Betty Parsons
and, of course, Julien Levy are present. Although no critic signed (probably
as a professional courtesy to Genauer), writer Malcolm Cowley and art historian
Meyer Schapiro did. It is hard to imagine the work of any living artist
receiving such universal acclaim from a wide array of artists who, though
gathered by the press under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism, rarely,
if ever, accepted this collective identity. Gorky—or the cause he represented
for them—had forged this exceptional unanimity.The Book
Six years passed between the closing of the Whitney's exhibition and the publication of Schwabacher's monograph. During that time, Gorky's reputation grew to the point that, in 1953, Henry McBride reported in Art News, "both kinds of success have been achieved for Gorky—the success of professional esteem and the final reward of a selling success."12 This posthumous fame helped inspire Schwabacher to continue work on the monograph, which was proving far harder than she had expected. That same year, Goodrich wrote one of numerous responses to the drafts she sent him. [Fig. 22] Always supportive ("your additions to the manuscript on Gorky have enriched it"), he firmly guided the process, defining the goals and structure as if they emerged naturally from Schwabacher's revisions.
| Your method (which is that of most good
critical writing) is to start with intensive study of individual works,
meditating on them, following trains of thought suggested by them,
and building your essay out of them. In this you have always revealed
remarkable observation and insight, brilliant intuitions, and a most
unusual combination of the painter's understanding of painting and
the gift of expressing it in words.Your greatest
problem has always been that of the overall organization of your material.
I can sympathize with this, because for years I began with my notes
on individual pictures without knowing beforehand what my overall
organization would turn out to be, and the latter developed only as
I wrote and rewrote. This problem of organization is one of the most
difficult in writing, and especially difficult in the case of Gorky,
who went through many phases of content and style. What you are
doing is writing the history of an artist's development—his characteristics
as an artist, his ideas, the influences on him, the evolution of his
art, and how one phase grew out of another. |
After supplying Schwabacher with this seasoned guidance, Goodrich moved on to specific recommendations. With tremendous patience, he repeated this exercise year after year until he finally judged the manuscript ready for publication.
Published in 1957,
Arshile Gorky [Fig.
23] opened with a foreword by Goodrich and an introduction by Meyer
Schapiro. Schapiro, a professor at Columbia University and signatory of
the 1951 protest, was the foremost academic advocate of modern art. He had
given Schwabacher editorial advice as early as 1953 and offered high praise
for the final product: "An artist rarely has the good fortune to be the
subject of a study by one who has known him well and has loved his art with
as much understanding as the exquisitely sensitive author of this book."
No author could wish for a more distinguished pair of supporters. After years of research,
Schwabacher had unearthed the facts for a biography that differed radically
from what even Gorky's friends thought they knew about his past. Beginning
with his birthplace, Schwabacher reconstructed his childhood and early youth
(supplying, for example, his baptismal name, Vosdanig Adoian). Although
succeeding writers have found additional material and corrected some of
her conclusions, Schwabacher's book stands as a pioneering effort to unravel
the intricate myths Gorky spent much of his life constructing. Schwabacher strove
to represent each phase of his career without bias and to define his extremely
varied sources of inspiration without minimizing their sometimes contradictory
effects on his art: "He used a contemporary structure, cubism, and a contemporary
method, the automatism of surrealism; he also used a contemporary poetic
center, the psychology of the unconscious. But for his imagery he drew on
his early life or his sensations of nature." The result is a shift in the
balance of her narrative. Instead of the 1951 exhibition's emphasis on Gorky's
late work, the book gives nearly equal attention to his earlier art and
his devotion to the masters. In doing so, it not only provides the first
substantial attempt to analyze how Gorky built his art from the innovations
of old and modern masters, as well as from his Armenian heritage, but also
offers a model for addressing a matter of fundamental importance to American
art of the thirties and forties: how foreign art and cultures slowly overcame
the ardent nationalism of that time. Yet the monograph remains true to Schwabacher's
fundamental goal of presenting Gorky in his uniqueness—which makes
it all the more valuable for historians. Among the many reviews,
the most insightful was by Robert Rosenblum. Signaling Gorky's importance,
Rosenblum wrote, "It is most appropriate, then, that the first full-scale
monograph on an artist who belongs to this recent phase of American painting
be devoted to Gorky." He commended Schwabacher for focusing on Gorky alone—"Mrs.
Schwabacher has devoted almost exclusive attention to the unraveling of
the artist and his work," and he cautioned, "it should be stressed how very
different Gorky is from his 'Abstract Expressionist' compatriots (a term
Mrs. Schwabacher wisely avoids) with whom he is so often and so indiscriminately
classified. Pollock, Still, Kline, Rothko and Guston belong to a world that
could hardly be more alien to Gorky, and whatever connective links they
may be found to have with him must be more apparent than real."13
Published the month
in which Jasper Johns' first exhibition opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery,
this review acknowledges a fundamental change in Gorky's reputation. When
the Whitney held its "Memorial Exhibition" in 1951, Abstract Expressionism
was a new phenomenon, and Gorky was easily appropriated for its defense
(or ridicule). But a decade after his death, both Gorky's career and Abstract
Expressionism were becoming recognized by discerning critics as distinct
historical events. As Schwabacher showed with such dedication, Gorky had
been crucial to the development of American art in large part because he
remained a fascinating alien to the end. Conclusion
Far more than any other organization or individual, the Whitney Museum established Gorky as one of the leading artists of the twentieth century. To the general public and even many in the art world, a museum's purchases, exhibitions, and publications often suggest that the museum is executing a calculated, long-term program to define and confer status on selected art. Yet the case of Gorky demonstrates the opposite, and it is probably a much more accurate representation of how museums function. The Whitney's very influential activities—its public face—stemmed almost entirely from the efforts of two people, Lloyd Goodrich and Ethel Schwabacher, who were able to marshal the Museum's resources as their belief in Gorky's importance grew. Without their support, it is unlikely the Whitney would have championed Gorky, and Alfred Barr's own account makes it clear that the Modern would not have stepped in; at that time, no other museum had the capacity to transform an artist's reputation. Yet Goodrich easily could have maintained his early dismissal of Gorky and might well have dissuaded Schwabacher from undertaking the monograph, or, once begun, left it to founder without editorial guidance. However tenuous the chances of success, the collaboration between these two friends of very different temperament and professional goals was responsible for the cultivation of Gorky's standing among a wide variety of interested parties. If Goodrich and Schwabacher had not chosen to preserve their papers, little of this decades-long process would be known; by placing the papers at the Whitney, Schwabacher, in particular (who was never a member of the Whitney staff), confirmed the fundamental importance of the Museum in helping support Gorky. (Her other papers, relating primarily to her own art, were deposited with the Archives of American Art.) Perhaps this lesson about the inner workings of a great museum is as important to the history of art as the creation of an individual artist's reputation or role in the art of his time.
Postscript
Both Schwabacher and the Whitney were less prominent in guiding the discussion of Gorky's art after 1957. In 1962, she and Goodrich again teamed up to organize a thirty-work Gorky retrospective for the Venice Biennale, the first substantial exhibition of Gorky's art in Europe. But other curators and other institutions played a greater role after that. In December 1962, The Museum of Modern art opened its first Gorky exhibition, organized by William Seitz. In 1981, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented the most recent retrospective. The catalogues for both shows acknowledge the groundbreaking contributions of the Whitney exhibition and monograph.
In 1994, the Whitney
held its next exhibition of Gorky's work, a small show that brought together
for the first time all three Betrothal paintings and many related
drawings in order to explore the series in depth. The Museum continued to
acquire Gorky's work, although not the major paintings it had gathered in
previous decades. In 1980, Edwin Bergman contributed an important early
drawing, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia (c. 1931-32) [Fig.
24]; in 1982, Lloyd Goodrich donated Drawing (1946) [Fig.
25], which he had received from the Schwabachers; and during the 1970s
and 1980s several other prints and drawings were donated to the collection.14
In 1999, the Museum came full circle, as it were, purchasing a preparatory
drawing for The Artist and his Mother.End Notes
1. André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, suivi de Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme et de fragments inédits (New York: Brentano's, 1945). Return to Essay
2. For a complete list of Gorky's appearances in Whitney Annuals and Biennials, see The Annual and Biennial Exhibition Record of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1918-1989 (Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1991), pp. 184-85. Return to Essay
3. The Whitney Museum archival file for this exhibition contains the typescript of Davis' essay, which includes several paragraphs arguing against realist trends in contemporary art. These paragraphs did not appear in the published introduction. Return to Essay
4. Quoted in Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 376. Return to Essay
5. Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, October 18, 1937, translation of letter in the Arshile Gorky Papers, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Return to Essay
6. Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, January 1, 1938, translation of letter in the Arshile Gorky Papers, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Return to Essay
7. Although the Museum's accession records for December 1, 1937 through June 1, 1938 cite the price of the Homer as $5,000, the accompanying asterisk refers to an additional payment of $2,650. Return to Essay
8. Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street, p. 337. Return to Essay
9. Unpublished reminiscence by Balcomb Greene written in 1951 for The Magazine of Art,typescript in the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Return to Essay
10. Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 241. As a member of the family, Spender had special access to Gorky's widow, Mougouch, in preparing his biography. In an email to the author, dated February 3, 2000, Spender wrote, "the story re Barr was told to Mougouch by Gorky, who told it to me." Return to Essay
11. For a brief biography of Ethel Schwabacher, see Brenda S. Webster and Judith Emlyn Johnson, eds., Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993). Return to Essay
12. "By Henry McBride," Art News, 53 (April 1953), p. 66. Return to Essay
13. Robert Rosenblum, "Arshile Gorky," Arts, 32 (January 1958), pp. 30-33. Return to Essay
14. The four additional works by Gorky—two drawings and two prints—in the Permanent Collection are: Study for "Mechanics of Flying," Newark Airport Aviation Murals, c. 1936 (gouache on paper, 80.16); Portrait of Bart van der Schelling, c. 1939 (ink on paper napkin, 79.48); Mannikin, 1931 (lithograph, 74.36); and Christmas Card, c. 1931 (woodcut, 87.9). Return to Essay