Book Review: 'arshile Gorky: His Life Work'

[Azat]

Nonfiction. By Hayden Herrera.

Illustrated. 767 pages. $45.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

 

The arrival of "Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work," by Hayden Herrera, confirms that the Armenian-born American painter has largely eluded the three hefty biographies that have clustered around the centennial of his birth in the early 1900's.

 

First was "From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky" (1999), by Matthew Spender, a sculptor and writer who is married to Gorky's older daughter, Maro. Then came "Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky" (2000), by Nouritza Matossian, a London-based music critic of Armenian descent.

 

Herrera, the author of an acclaimed biography of Frida Kahlo, has her own Gorky connection. Her godmother is Mougouch, as Gorky renamed Agnes Magruder (now Agnes Gorky Fielding), an independent-minded 20-year-old socialite when he met and married her in 1941.

 

Yet while these books provide vastly more information about the artist's extraordinary life, none ties his achievement to history, art history or his tortured psyche as memorably as Harold Rosenberg's slim, fiercely lucid "Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea" of 1962.

 

Gorky's saga is a biographer magnet, bracketed as it is by the Ottoman Empire's killing of more than a million Armenians in World War I (during which his mother starved to death) and his death by suicide in 1948.

 

By 1926 he was living in Greenwich Village, having shed his real name (Vosdanik Adoian) and recast himself as Russian, a cousin of Maxim Gorky. Over the next 15 years he painstakingly worked his way through Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso and Miró to the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism. The voluptuous forms and glowing colors of his late abstractions were inspired by memories of the landscape of his childhood, recalled from summers spent drawing from nature on a northern Virginia farm belonging to Mougouch's family.

 

Then, within 18 months beginning in 1946, Gorky endured a devastating studio fire; a colostomy for rectal cancer, and a car accident that left his neck broken and his painting arm paralyzed.

 

Finally, the marriage that had brought happiness and artistic fulfillment collapsed under the strain. Mougouch had a brief affair with the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta Echaurren, a close friend of the couple. In physical and emotional agony, Gorky hanged himself.

 

Herrera's "Gorky" is the most thoroughly researched and reliable, and it devotes the most space to Gorky's art. She argues convincingly that Gorky was born in 1900 rather than 1903, '04 or '05, and gives the frankest discussion of his sex life. Like Spender, she reappraises Mougouch's predicament, seeing her affair with Matta as desperation, not betrayal. But she lacks his ease as a writer and does not, for example, detail as vividly Gorky's bonds with his strange, sometimes violent Armenian relatives or his early friendships with Stuart Davis, John Graham and Willem de Kooning.

 

For long stretches, Herrera's Gorky is vague and out of focus, especially in the book's shapeless, repetitive first half, which at times seems barely edited. We learn more than once that Gorky had a mania for work and that he was attracted to beautiful young women he could "teach and mold." While elucidating, Herrera's meticulous analyses of individual paintings can drag on or conclude with banal interpretations.

 

Perhaps Herrera felt hobbled by the crowded field. She seems to have included every fact she unearthed. Some are fascinating, like Gorky's putting a 1917 date on a 1937 portrait for a show at the Museum of Modern Art. Many are clutter.

 

Ultimately, Herrera's book is saved by a Frida of its own: Mougouch, whose letters she quotes from extensively and to telling effect. Once Mougouch enters the picture, Herrera's insights sharpen, the pace picks up and the story becomes a portrait of a rich and unusual union that made possible some great painting.

 

By the end of 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 Herrera's next book will tell that story. It seems to be one that she knows exceptionally well.

 

The New York Times