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grate. Then in February 1948 Gorky was in an auto crash that resulted in a broken neck. When he returned from months in the hospital, he found that his right arm - his painting arm - was numb. In desperation he attempted to learn to draw with his left hand. At the point his wife left him, taking their children with her. It was finally too much for him. "On 21 July 1948," Mr. Rand writes, "Arshile Gorky hanged himself in a woodshed near his house in Sherman. Written on the wall near him was the message: 'Goodby My Loveds.'" Malcolm Cowley and Peter Blume, who were friends and neighbors of the painter in Connecticut, found the body.

This, then, was the life that Mr. Rand finds recorded in a plethora of eloquent and imaginative detail in the very paintings and drawings that so many earlier critics have insisted were abstractions. The key to has analysis is to be found in an observation made by Frederick Kiesler, the architect and sculptor, who wrote the first magazine article on Gorky in 1935. Kiesler was writing about the Newark Airport murals when he remarked of Gorky's art that "It isn't abstract, but it looks like an abstraction, but it looks like an abstraction," and this is the principle that Mr. Rand has found to obtain in all of the painter's so-called "abstractions." Even the alleged automatism of Gorky's late pictures is found to contain veiled references to specific figures, episodes and locales.

"The hoarded intimacy of Gorky's pictures," Mr. Rand declares, "came to resemble a diary, but also in their sequential flow paralleling and commenting on his life, they were a secretive editorialism. All was judged and painted from his particular moral stance. When his family was with him, he painted 'The Calenders'; to commemorate his father's death he painted 'The Orators'; in 1946-47, his cancer operation curtailing his marital sex life but not his sexuality, his marriage strained, he painted 'The Betrothal.'" The congruence of image and experience is traced with breathtaking precision.

Since the analyses that support Mr. Rand's brilliant reading of these and other paintings are far too lengthy and detailed to be quoted here, let one example suffice - an example that Mr. Rand knows very well is shocking in its implications. In the first of the paintings called "Agony" (1947), he identifies the central figure as "the pitiful suspended corpse" of Gorky himself. The picture is thus taken to be an agonized meditation on the prospect of the artist's own suicide, "Of all the figures in 'Agony,'" he writes, "only this one was developed in separate studies, which shows special concern. ...Gorky frequently returned to this figure adjusting the smallest details, altering tiny aspects for the best possible exposition. In each of the three sketches the figure's feet are placed differently, yielding different silhouettes and varying amounts of space between the feet. As we have seen, Gorky lavished effort when depicting a figure close to his heart." Even though Mr. Rand is clearly dismayed at this own discovery, which suggests that the artist contemplated suicide long before the event, he points out that "with the exception of his mother's face, no other motif element received such care" from Gorky's hand.

We may disagree with this interpretation of "Agony," of course, but once we have examined the visual detail marshalled in Mr. Rand's analysis, we are obliged to offer an alternative reading of the painting. To regard the picture as being primarily an abstraction is clearly absurd. And this, in turn, obliges us to revise our notions about the role of automatism in Gorky's painting. For an imagery so carefully prepared and so specifically executed, for a pictorial narrative so consciously worked out in advance, automatism - as that term is generally understood - was hardly an appropriate method of composition. The truth is, Gorky carefully stimulated the effects of automatist painting in a style that was at all times under total control and tethered to a particular iconography. Automatism was, in a sense, another of the many "lies" he was willing to let his admirers believe in.

So sweeping is Mr. Rand's interpretation of Gorky's oeuvre, and so convincing his argument on its behalf, that it instantly makes virtually all other commentaries on the artist obsolete. I am afraid that the book Diane Waldman has produced to accompany the current exhibition at the Guggenheim is no exception. It is valuable, to be sure, for its plates and its documentation, but its main text is little more than a skillful summary of the view of Gorky's art that Mr. Rand has now so successfully discredited. It is a book most unfortunate in its timing.

"The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky" is a curiosity of another sort. Karlen Mooradian is Gorky's nephew, and his devotion to his uncle's life and work has prompted him to collect family letters and to interview many of the artists who knew Gorky. The materials he has gathered in this volume will therefore be of some value to Gorky's future biographers, but Mr. Mooradian is not himself a writer equal to the task of placing these materials in any sort of meaningful perspective. As for Harold Rosenberg's little study of Gorky, its only interest now lies in the fact the Rosenberg wrote it. It is, in other words, an item for the Rosenberg bibliography, not the Gorky bibliography. For an understanding of Gorky and his art, Harry Rand's book is now the indispensable work.

Eugenia, Ginzburg's spellbinding story of survival- now brought to its moving conclusion.

HBJ
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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When her Journey into the Whirlwind was published, Eugenia Ginzburg's extraordinary memoir of her experiences in a Soviet concentration camp was hailed for its "honest poignancy" (Harrison Salisbury, N.Y. Times Book Review) and "passionately felt authenticity" (Time)...compared by Hannah Arendt to The Gulag Archipelago...praised as "a story for all time" (N.Y. Review of Books). Now, Within the Whirlwind tells of her heroic eighteen years in Eastern Siberia, first in the cruelest of Stalin's prison camps and later in precarious freedom.

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EUGENIA GINZBURG
Introduction by Heinrich Boll $17.50