Line readings: Arshile Gorky's drawings: an acknowledged pioneer of Abstract-Expressionist painting, Gorky was also a dedicated draftsman. His remarkably vigorous graphic oeuvre, encompassing independent works and preparatory studies, is the focus of a museum survey for the first time

Art in America, May, 2004 by Nancy Princenthal

In one of Gorky's two paintings of himself as a child with his mother, the boy's sleeve touches hers. In the other, more famous version, it doesn't. The problem is graphic, since it concerns contiguity and the resolution of spatial relationships with a line. It is also profoundly personal. The shared contours of the adjoining arms are the most heavily worked passage of a preparatory drawing--it has been squared for transfer--that is one of a handful of early portraits included in the Whitney Museum's spellbinding exhibition of Gorky's drawings (currently at the Menil Collection in Houston). This drawing's source, a talismanic photograph taken in 1912, when Gorky was around eight, is almost absurdly rich in meaning. The boy, wearing a formal but slightly shabby overcoat, is standing, while his mother is seated, so his head is slightly higher than hers. They are a couple: he is the bashful suitor, holding a sad little bouquet of flowers, his feet shuffled together awkwardly, and the hand closer to her held a little awkwardly, too. His mother's head is covered by a scarf, her body obscured in a boldly printed dress over which she wears a nondescript jacket. She seems solid as a mountain, except for her eyes, which are large, dark and impossibly beautiful. Probably tall for his age, Gorky (that's not yet his name; he was born Vosdanik Adoian) seems to just perceptibly crouch, which brings him nearer to his beloved, who, just a few years later, would die of starvation in his arms (or so his story went), a victim of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians [see A.i.A., Feb. '96]. So the drawing's contested interval, the space where the two figures touch, or don't, and where the pencil travels back and forth so unappeasably, becomes heartbreakingly fraught, a plunging emotional canyon.

Writing in 1962, Harold Rosenberg called Gorky's life "the exemplary fable of the artist in our time," and characterized the artist as a "monument of melancholy." (1) In Rosenberg's description, the "tall, dark and handsome" Gorky was distinguished by "war-orphan eyes." (2) Beware of blarney is what Rosenberg wants to say, with a wariness shared by other contemporaries in the New York 'art world who were skeptical of Gorky's tendency to sentimentalize or showboat about his peasant past and the brutalities he'd witnessed--his inclination to folk-singing and dancing at parties, for instance, was apparently subject to snickers. In a city of immigrants, the hardships of those newly arrived were not indulged. But Gorky's was, indeed, an exceptionally tough road, and despite the occasional anomaly--including Portrait of the Artist and His Mother--he can't be accused of dwelling on the past. Arriving in the United States from Armenia in 1920, at the age of 16, he set to work at once.

His program, largely self-directed, emphasized study of the masters: in museums and in reproductions, he consulted paintings by Uccello, Piero, Raphael, Brueghel, Vermeer, Poussin and Ingres. Then, in short order, followed Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, de Chirico and Miro. Gorky trained formally only briefly, in Boston (at the New School of Design, in 1922) and New York (at the National Academy of Design, for one month in 1925). More important by far were his firsthand observations of other artists' works. Gorky met and befriended John Graham in 1928, de Kooning and Stuart Davis in 1929, Matta in 1941, and Andre Breton and other expatriate Surrealists in 1944. The avalanche of cultural change Gorky assimilated rivals the absorptions traced in current globalism; maybe it was because his early experiences were so utterly incommensurate with his adopted culture that he apprenticed with such diligence, training not just to paint like Picasso but to channel the great painter's spirit. In Rosenberg's account, Gorky felt "imitation was a learning to be, as well as a learning to do." (3) De Kooning hailed Gorky's voracious visual appetite and uncanny acuity, calling him a "Geiger counter of art"; (4) Julien Levy, Gorky's dealer from 1945 to '48, credited his emotional reach: "I had never before met a painter with the empathy to enter so completely into the style of another." (5)

Whatever the motivation for his studious application to precedent, Gorky was a prodigious draftsman from the start. His process can be considered fundamentally graphic, not only because of his practice of analyzing the works of others by drawing them, or because he worked out his own paintings in drawings to a degree unusual for such seemingly spontaneous compositions, but because all his work is linear in essence. And, most telling, a big proportion of his finished output is on paper. "Drawing is the basis of art," (6) he wrote to his sister in 1942, a statement fully substantiated by this exhibition, which was organized by the Whitney Museum's former adjunct curator of drawings, Janie C. Lee.

Following an introductory sampling of Gorky's Cubist figure studies of the late 1920s and early '30s, heavily influenced by Picasso, the survey proceeds to a selection from the 20 variations that comprise the series "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia" (1931-34). In these ink drawings, surreal, biomorphic shapes that seem paradoxically physical and even functional are staged in a variety of positions in a dark, ominous space. Gorky's account of the series's genesis--"wounded birds, poverty, and a whole week of rain" (7)--captures its expression of aggravated confinement, but belies the drawings' dramatic, pitch-black shadows and mischievous shape-shifting, which are far from glum.