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Major Guggenheim Show Charts Arshile Gorky's Passion for Art

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[[terance]] that was undeniably his own. There were still creative infatuations to come - in the case of Miró, above all - but both the paintings and the drawings bore a load of introspection that was quite alien to the European models that Gorky had set himself to emulate. His imagery, though rarely explicit, came as much from the butter churns, the wild carrots, the nesting porcupines and the blue rocks half-buried in the black earth of Armenia as from anything he found in this country. And when he touched upon human relations, there was something vulnerable, anguished and inexpungeably private about what resulted. There are paintings at the Guggenheim on which we feel almost ashamed to eavesdrop.

It is in keeping with the confessional character of much of Gorky's art that in his masterworks - notably "The Liver Is a Cock's Comb," on loan from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo - we slither back and forth between the known and the unknown, the formed and the unformed, and the private and the universal. Gorky at such times sets up a strong contrast between the rich, slow, poignant beat of the color and the antlike celerity of the images. When we are saved from drowning in the orange and purple waters of a lake of deep feeling, we feel ourselves tweaked, nipped and bitten by innumerable small creatures to which we cannot put a name.

It sounds like an uneasy situation, and that's exactly what it is. Gorky could lose himself in nature, as in the "Garden in Sochi" series and the wonderful drawings that he made in 1943 on a farm in Virginia, but he came back in the end to his own hurts and distresses. Though put out of mind in the early 1940's by an initially blissful marriage and an awareness of great powers newly come to fulfilment, those hurts and distresses were merely in abeyance until such time as misfortune should strike again. When it did indeed strike again, in ways that even Job would have found discouraging, Gorky had no defense against it.

Like most retrospectives, this one is too big. We wait too long for Gorky to get out of his self-imposed tutelage, and the mature work would look better if there were not quite so much of it. But the great paintings are there, and the great drawings are there, and Diane Waldman, the museum's curator of exhibitions, stays with Gorky every inch of the way. It makes for an event of exceptional fascination.

Other shows of interest this week:

Brian Wall (Max Hutchinson Gallery, 138 Greene Street): Brian Wall, a British sculptor long resident in this country, is unmistakable for the skill and the imagination with which he takes forms that ought not to go together and makes their conjunction look predestined. The forms in question are cut from steel sheets and linked by rods, the whole being painted matte black. The present show covers 25 years of work, during which Mr. Wall has stayed on course without ever getting either dull or repetitious. (Through May 9.)

Robert Doisneau (Witkin Gallery, 41 East 57th Street): Robert Doisneau has been a very good photographer indeed almost - so it sometimes seems - since the newest thing on the horizon of Paris was the Eiffel Tower. His classic images of Paris and the Parisians linger in the mind like stills from a great movie that never got made; and even when his subject is familiar to us he makes us feel that we have never seen it before. (Who else could have given us a completely fresh and yet manifestly authentic impression of Picasso at home?) His present show runs the gamut of Parisian social history from the eve of World War II to the Beaubourg era, and there isn't a print on the wall that this visitor didn't want to take home. (Through May 30.)


SPRING ART Exhibitions

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