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FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1981 GORKY WEEKEND

'Oedipus' at BAM Theater (Page C3) Park Ave. Renaissance Fair (Page C3)

Olivier's Films Revisited (Page C6) 'The Hand,' Clever Horror Movie (Page C8)

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"Woman's Head," painted in 1930, and "Garden in Sochi" (1943) are part of the Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum

Guggenheim Retrospective Charts
Arshile Gorky's Passion for Art

By JOHN RUSSELL

MUCH of what is best in the American art of the last 40 years is owed to men and women who would never have been in this country at all had it not been for the long history of intolerance at the turn of the century that disfigured country after country in Europe, from Poland in the northwest to Armenia in the southeast. An archetypal figure in that context is Vosdanik Adoian, later and now universally known as Archile Gorky, whose retrospective exhibition opens today at the Guggenheim Museum and can be seen there through July 19.

His was an extraordinary history. He was born in April 1904 on the shores of Lake Van in Armenia. The memory of the august and sumptuous countryside stayed with him for the rest of his life, shaping his thoughts, his feelings and the subject matter of much of his art. For that matter even the casual visitor must be

captivated by Lake Van, where isolated stone churches of great antiquity stand in a landscape of great natural magnificence. Closer inspection will reveal manuscripts, wall paintings and sculptures that speak for a proud and fiery civilization, which has survived long periods of vindictive harassment with its every tradition intact.

When the future Arshile Gorky arrived in this country as a boy of 15, he was possessed, like so many other people in this position, by the determination to become someone and to belong somewhere in the huge new country that had been pressed upon him. He chose a name for himself, and an imperious instinct led him to stick to the passion for drawing that had fired him ever since he had seen the traditional carvings on tombstones in his native Armenia.

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The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution

Never doubting that he had been put on this earth to draw and paint, he set out to measure himself against the great painters of the recent past. He was all flame and fire, in that connection. ("Has there in six centuries been better art than Cubism,?" he would say). He recognized the supreme art of the previous half-century at a time when its supremacy was by no means universally accepted. He thought, he taught and he worked as hard as anyone in modern-art history. Though harassed by poverty of the most grinding sort, he never stinted on first-class artist's materials. Nor did it deter him when his paintings piled up in the studio and hardly anybody ever wanted to but them.

He proceeded by emulation. As is made abundantly clear at the Guggenheim, he wanted not to "copy" Cézanne and his successors, but to make himself one flesh with them. Almost the first half of the Guggenheim show is taken up with work that is penetrated by Cézanne, Picasso and others, to the point at which, to most Europeans, it looks simply derivative. It would be difficult to get in closer to Cézanne, to Picasso, to Braque and to Miró than Gorky did. He lived their paintings to a degree that we cannot imagine surpassed. This is a case in which the poetics of emulation banish any thought of mere copying.

Quite apart from that, there are the Armenian affinities that find their way into the work even when emulation is at tits most intense. One of them is for a crisp, exact, springy line like the one that catches the light on Armenian tombstones. Another is for the unmistakable gamut of Armenian color, so rich in crushed lilacs, powdered lavenders, bruised reds and browns that sing out like velvet. There is a bay not far from the start of the show that is not in the least folkloristic in its subject matter and yet whisks us straight to Yerevan.

It was in terms of a combination of these two - the darting, inquisitive line and the color that comes from thousands of miles away - that in the late 1930's he began to break through to an utterance

Continued on Page C20