Books in Brief: Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols

Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols, by Harry Rand (Allanheld & Schram, 246 pp., $40). Professor Rand’s thesis—pursued with indefatigable scholarship, insight, and grace—is that Gorky’s mature painting (1938-48) is not abstract, as has been generally believed, but, “in the broadest sense, representational.” As a refugee from the Turkish holocaust in Armenia during World War I, the artist composed his first pictures out of childhood memories and old photographs to capture the atmosphere of serenity and familial devotion that preceded the disastrous uprooting. In the second phase Gorky assimilated the dominant modernist styles, Cubism and Surrealism, into his continuing effort to recapture his childhood. Already a master of dissimulation (his invented name and the titles of some of his pictures were intended to create for the public a more fashionable Russian background; his love-letters were lifted word for word from the published correspondence of Gaudier-Brzeska), Gorky’s obsession with painting in a language of secret signs came naturally. It was in the last decade of his tormented life (he committed suicide in 1948) that he produced the paintings on which his stature as the last of the Surrealists or the first of the Abstract Expressionists is founded. The wholly personal subject matter is still present but much harder to find. “One would not,” says Professor Rand, “have expected his goal of an apparently non-objective expression founded on precise content to be realized so quickly.” The assumptions on which this work of staggering scholarship are based are unstated because the author is firmly in the mainstream of modernist criticism. The biggest assumption is that personal imagery is the stuff out of which major art can be made. The moral imperative of art, that passion to present a critique of Man in all his nobility and degradation which informs the work of all the great artists from Rembrandt and Grunewald to Goya and Orozco, is nowhere to be found in Gorky, his modernist peers, or their critics.

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Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols, by Harry Rand (Allanheld & Schram, 246 pp., $40). Professor Rand’s thesis—pursued with indefatigable scholarship, insight, and grace—is that Gorky’s mature painting (1938-48) is not abstract, as has been generally believed, but, “in the broadest sense, representational.” As a refugee from the Turkish holocaust in Armenia during World War I, the artist composed his first pictures out of childhood memories and old photographs to capture the atmosphere of serenity and familial devotion that preceded the disastrous uprooting. In the second phase Gorky assimilated the dominant modernist styles, Cubism and Surrealism, into his continuing effort to recapture his childhood. Already a master of dissimulation (his invented name and the titles of some of his pictures were intended to create for the public a more fashionable Russian background; his love-letters were lifted word for word from the published correspondence of Gaudier-Brzeska), Gorky’s obsession with painting in a language of secret signs came naturally. It was in the last decade of his tormented life (he committed suicide in 1948) that he produced the paintings on which his stature as the last of the Surrealists or the first of the Abstract Expressionists is founded. The wholly personal subject matter is still present but much harder to find. “One would not,” says Professor Rand, “have expected his goal of an apparently non-objective expression founded on precise content to be realized so quickly.” The assumptions on which this work of staggering scholarship are based are unstated because the author is firmly in the mainstream of modernist criticism. The biggest assumption is that personal imagery is the stuff out of which major art can be made. The moral imperative of art, that passion to present a critique of Man in all his nobility and degradation which informs the work of all the great artists from Rembrandt and Grunewald to Goya and Orozco, is nowhere to be found in Gorky, his modernist peers, or their critics.