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GORKY 
file

The Pictures in the Paintings

ARSHILE GORKY
The Implications of Symbols.
By Harry Rand.
Illustrated. 246pp. Montclair, N.J.:
Allanheld & Schram. $40.

ARSHILE GORKY 1904-1948

A Retrospective.
By Diane Waldman.
Illustrated. 285 pp. New York:
Harry N. Abrams/in collaboration
With the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. $45.

THE MANY WORLDS OF ARSHILE GORKY 
By Karen Mooradian.
Illustrated. 327pp. Chicago:
Gilgamesh Press Limited.
Cloth, $18.95. Paper, $9.95

ARSHILE GORKY
The Man, the Time, the Idea.
By Harold Rosenberg.
Illustrated. 144pp. New York:
The Sheep Meadow Press/
Flying Point Books. Distributed by Persea Books.
Paper. $5.95.

By HILTON KRAMER

Time has altered our perspective on Arshile Gorky. This much revered painter, who died a suicide in 1948 at the age of 44, has long been acknowledged to be one of the pivotal figures in the formation of the New York School - an artist who forged a crucial link between the modernist art of the School of Paris (Cézanne, Picasso, Miró et al.) and the beginnings of the Abstract Expressionist movement that transformed American painting in the 1940's. His importance in this regard has been amply confirmed in the big retrospective exhibition, organized by Diane Waldman, that is currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through July 19.

Yet despite his honored status, or perhaps because of it, we have been slow in attempting to get at the meaning of Gorky's art. In making him a hero of art history- our art history- we seem to have neglected something about his art that was decisive for Gorky himself, something that formed the very armature of his pictorial imagination. This was the subject matter, or content, of Gorky's art. The reasons for this neglect are interesting, and tell us something significant about the art - and the art criticism - of the past few decades.

That Gorky's art - especially the paintings and drawings of the 40's that brought it to a climactic achievement - harbored a very personal imagery (or "poetic content," as critics often described it), was never exactly denied. Very often, indeed, it was openly alluded to, if only to be discounted. But no systematic attempt was made to explore this imagery. That would have violated the widely shared assumption among champions of the New York School that what really mattered in Gorky's art was that it was abstract, and abstract in a particular way- that it was based, in other words, on automatist methods. The esthetic prestige of the whole movement seemed at times to depend on an interpretation of Gorky's 

[[image]]
Arshile Gorky.

paintings that gave absolute priority to their purely abstract qualities, and it was as an abstract painter - albeit one who had made certain detours into explicit representation - that Gorky was ushered into the history of modern art. If there was anything systematic in the Gorky literature, it was the suppression of any inquiry into the nature of the "poetic content" that virtually everyone recognized was there.

Thus for the late Harold Rosenberg- in his book, "Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea," first published in 1962 and now reissued in paperback - the case was clear. "Gorky was a pioneer in discovering the primary principles of America's new abstract art," he wrote. Lest anyone assume that there might be something more than a strictly abstract idiom lurking in this painting, Rosenberg insisted that for Gorky "the canvas was not a surface upon which to present an image"- an astonishing statement when we really ponder it. Rosenberg cautioned us against the folly of any close analysis of the work. "Attempts to 'read' Gorky's picture for disclosures concerning the pathos of the flesh or the destiny of man seem ill advised," he wrote. "Not in his metaphors but in the action of his hand in fastening them within their painting-concept lies the meaning of his work."

This admonitory note was sounded again by Irving Sandler when he came to write the first comprehensive history of the New York School - "The Triumph of American Painting," published in 1970. "Gorky's abstractions did not illustrate any particular scene or autobiographical event," Mr. Sandler declared. What counted for Mr. Sandler - what was thought to guarantee Gorky his stellar position among the elders of the New York School - was the painter's success in making "a grand style of automatism."

And so it has usually gone. In a popular college textbook, "American Art," published two years ago, the author concerned with the history of the New York School - Professor Sam Hunter of Princeton University - assured his readers that in Gorky's painting "abstract and anti-illusionistic shapes... had their impact principally through paint marks and material surface." The "vaguely erotic mood" that Professor Hunter detected in Gorky's work was attributed to a residual, imperfectly exorcised - and certainly not to be admired - attachment to Surrealism.

One has to have some sense of this protracted history of high-minded evasion and voluntary blindness in the Gorky literature in order to appreciate the immense importance of Harry Rand's new book on the artist. For in writing "Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols," Mr. Rand - who is curator of 20th century painting and sculpture at the National Museum of American Art in Washington - has broken with all the assumptions governing this entrenched view of Gorky as a hero of abstraction. He has given us instead a very persuasive, well-documented and movingly written account of an artist for whom a certain subject matter was of absolutely crucial artistic importance. Now for the first time, the so-called "poetic content" of Gorky's art is closely examined and definitively explained. The result is a book that not only alters - and alters profoundly - our whole understanding of Gorky's painting, including precisely those parts of it that have seemed most "abstract," but also raises many questions about the way we have "read" the work of his contemporaries. It clearly inaugurates a distinctly new phase in the study of the New York School and, when placed beside recent studies of Kandinsky, Picasso and others, can be seen as part of a historic revision in the interpretation of modern
Continued on Page 18

Hilton Kramer is chief art critic of The New York Times.

The New York Times Book Review/June 21, 1981      3