Gorky's distant likenesses: a recent exhibition of Arshile Gorky's portraiture, the first show devoted solely to that subject, featured works ranging from precise, highly individuated drawings to paintings in which sitters were stripped of specific traits, gestures and even personality as the artist sought to "elevate" them to the ideal

When in the 1930s Jacob Kainen turned up weekly at 36 Union Square to pose for Arshile Gorky, he was always amazed to see that Gorky had scraped and sanded his portrait down. "I want the surface smooth, like glass," Gorky explained. The many layers of pigment would, he said, give forms solidity and resonance. He also offered the young painter this advice: "Keep things flat. Don't over-model or you will lose the clear, flat shape. You don't want it round like a sausage." (1) Another time he cautioned Raphael Soyer to eliminate the highlight from the hair in a portrait Soyer was making of Gorky. "You know, this disturbs the painting," Gorky said. "If you just make the shape of the hair and omit the shine ... it will then play a stronger part in the picture." (2) Even when he painted portraits (most of them are from the 1930s), Gorky thought like an abstractionist. By the late 1920s, his influences had moved from Cezanne to Matisse and Braque, and then to Picasso's Synthetic Cubism. He transformed his sitters in the same way that he transformed still-life objects, stripping them of their specificity in a search for essential form. "Whistler's mother was anyone's mother," he said. "Art is always universal." (3)

In March, the Gagosian Gallery, New York, mounted the first exhibition devoted solely to Gorky's portraiture, a genre that Gorky explored in the 1920s and '30s and in which he could express feelings of longing that are also the underlying subject in his better-known abstract work. The show included 13 paintings and 18 drawings made between 1926 and 1943.

In order to create portraits that had all the rigor and tension of abstraction, Gorky allowed no detail of dress or accouterment to locate his portrait subjects in time, place or socio-economic bracket. The particulars of personality are absent as well. Figures express no fleeting emotions. Instead, their mood is elegiac. They are never depicted in motion: if a sitter grew weary and began to fiddle, Gorky would be irritated: "Women should be like cabbages," he told one girlfriend. (4) Gestures are emblematic, as when, in Portrait of Ahko (ca. 1939), his sister Aqaba puts her hand to her chin in a classical position of contemplation or, according to Matthew Spender's fine catalogue preface, mourning. Except in two versions of The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-36 and ca. 1926-42) and in some self-portraits, Gorky's sitters do not look at us. Instead they gaze soulfully to one side, as if preoccupied with their thoughts. His sisters' reveries seem sorrowful: one imagines them revisiting some terror witnessed in their long-lost Armenian homeland [see A.i.A., Feb. '96].

Because for Gorky the presence of the model was a prompt for the invention of abstract form, his portraits have much in common with his contemporaneous abstractions. In both modes, Gorky's metamorphic imagination, his urge to turn one thing into another, was irrepressible. The shadow inside an ear or a loop of hair becomes a biomorph. In Portrait of Master Bill (ca. 1937), the sitter's sleeves swell into abstract forms, and his forearms detach themselves from his body to become flat shapes that seem to float up to the canvas surface. The place where one shape meets another (for example, at the neckline) is crucial. David Smith remembered watching Gorky "working over an area edge probably a hundred times to reach an infinite without changing the rest of the picture." (5) What is most remarkable about Gorky's portraits is the sensuous vigor of his paint surface. All that scraping and repainting created surfaces that seem to hold layers of time, but that are, thanks to the overlay of swift free strokes, absolutely fresh.

Much of the tension in Gorky's portraits comes from a dichotomy between the sitter's strange remoteness and anonymity and the emphatic presence and particularity of texture, color and shape. Gorky felt that by turning the sitter into a semi-abstraction, in a process that he once called the "elevation" of the object, he could give his figure eternal life. The Fayum portrait painters of Egypt, he wrote in 1936, "operated upon the dead so that the dead might live forever--never to die!" (6) Thus, when he based two portraits on a photograph of himself and his mother taken in Turkish Armenia in 1912, he "operated" on the figures, transforming them according to what he had learned from Ingres, Cezanne, Picasso and from Fayum portraits. He turned his own image into a semblance of Picasso's 1906 Self-Portrait, and he turned his beloved mother, who had starved to death in 1919, into a Madonna-like icon so that her memory could be made permanent.

The time-bound and the specific were perhaps too painful or tenuous for Gorky: to protect himself from his own sense of vulnerability he had to push things away, to give his subjects the distance of the ideal. Having survived the Armenian genocide of 1915, he was so attuned to loss that in Portrait of Ahko he even transformed his adored older sister into a classical image. His younger sister, Vartoosh, in the 1933-34 portrait owned by the Hirshhorn, has a different kind of distance: with her olive pallor and masklike features, she looks more dead than alive. Gorky's passion for Picasso informs this portrait almost as much as does his attachment to his sibling. In Portrait of Myself and My Imaginary Wife (1933-34), Gorky (a bachelor at the time) turns away from the woman he has depicted. She is an ideal of modesty, warmth and plenitude, not a particular individual. With eyes downcast and his head bowed like that of the crucified Christ, Gorky appears to dwell instead upon some inner vision.