‘I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself…’
Painted at the beginning of the 1940s, Gorky’s Garden in Sochi paintings are among his most celebrated and mark a transformative period in the artist’s career. It was in this series that he broke free from the influence of European Modernism and began to form the idiosyncratic and ground-breaking style that would characterise the last decade of his life. These developments would place him at the centre of New York’s art world during the 1940s and have a profound influence on the New York School artists.
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Image: © Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture collects ion via Getty Images
Almost as soon as Gorky started working on the series both he and his contemporaries realised the seminal importance of these pictures. Of the eight oil paintings and three gouaches that make up this series, five are in major museum collects ions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York were quick to acquire one of the earlier examples painted in in 1941 (fig. 1) and shortly after the acquisition in 1942, curator Dorothy Miller wrote to Gorky asking him to provide a text about the work for their records. His response was a prose-poem that evoked his childhood in Armenia: ‘[…] my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit […] There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of Paul Uccello’s painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and the other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold […]. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don’t know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach it to the tree. Thus through many years of the same act like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signature, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h-h of silver leaves of the poplars’ (Arshile Gorky, Letter sent to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 26th June 1942).
The text reveals one truth about the pictures; ‘Sosi’ is the Armenian word for poplar and the garden of poplars to which the text refers was close to his childhood home. The transcription of the title as ‘Sochi’ – a resort on the Black Sea in Russia – was a deliberate misdirection on Gorky’s part and doubtless intended to reinforce his fabricated background as a Russian aristocrat. However, the whimsical narrative, captured in the style of Surrealist poetry, does more to establish a mood than provide an explication for the paintings. In this respect it perfectly illustrates an aspect of Gorky’s art; as Harry Rand observed: ‘The force of expression is felt but not the source’ (H. Rand, op. cit., p. 72). There is a delicate play between figuration and abstraction; from the swathes of brilliant yellow amorphous figures emerge. With Gorky’s text in mind, we can tentatively identify birds, trees, women, rocks and perhaps even the pennants of Uccello’s warriors waving in the breeze (fig. 2). Rand identified certain elements clearly, writing of the present work: ‘This is perhaps the finest exposition of the theme, with its sparkling prismatic colours. The woman in her large, wide-brimmed hat can be found very clearly at the left. In each of the three paintings the garden and its furnishings shift slightly, yet the major components are present in all three versions, each transcribed in an almost fluid Miróesque vocabulary’ (ibid., p. 78).
‘All the Sochi paintings are sprightly and festive in feeling […]. The yellow-ground version [the present work] open’s the painting’s space and creates a feeling of abundance and release. Its burst of radiant yellow brings to mind those curious lines that Gorky copied into one of his love letters to Corinne: “Some day, beyond the horizon and beyond habit, there would burst a sun all sulphur and Love”’
(right) Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology,1938, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Image: © 2021. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence, Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.
The Miróesque vocabulary of Garden in Sochi points to its role in a decisive period for the artist. The early part of his career had been characterised by his remarkable ability to impersonate and assimilate the style of others – most notably Cézanne and Picasso – but in 1940 he appears to have found his own voice. This was in part due to his growing awareness of Surrealism and his subsequent interest in automatic process and free association of thought. He began to look back to his childhood in Armenia, using his memories of that t.mes as the starting point for the panoply of invented creatures, forms and colours that began to populate his work. His formal developments were influenced by both Joan Miró’s revolutionary approach to colour and line and the indefinite, phantasmagorical landscapes of Roberto Matta’s canvases. Crucially though, for the first t.mes he was able to assimilate these influences into a style that was purely his own, what Julien Levy defined as ‘Abstract Surrealism’. As William Rubin argues: ‘In this triad of Gardens in Sochi The Miróesque version [the present work] is the pivotal picture […] it is his only finished picture that may be called an imitation of Miró […]. But even here there is much in the way Gorky scallops his forms for which there is no precedent in Miró, and the meandering contouring, almost oriental in its melismatic fluidity, anticipates the later very personal character of Gorky’s line’ (W. Rubin, in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970 (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., pp. 383-384).
‘Here is an art entirely new, a leap beyond the ordinary and the known to indicate, with an impeccable arrow of light, a real feeling of liberty.’
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Image: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK AND DACS, LONDON 2021
His technique too was richer, and highly original. Building up multiple layers of paint he created a smooth, almost enamel-like surface on which the colours seem to pool organically, finding form whilst retaining a sense of infinite movement. The complexity and depth of colour is a joy to behold. As John Golding explains: ‘By evolving a type of composition in which the picture surface becomes a field over which the painter ranges freely back and forth, and in which occasionally pockets of interest and complexity occur, but in which there is no one centre of focus or interest, Gorky was making one of his most important contributions to emergent revolutionary American art – towards what American painters of the 1940s used to call an ‘over-all’ type of painting’ (J. Golding, ‘Arshile Gorky: The Search for Self’, in Arshile Gorky (exhibition catalogue), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1990, p. 23). This singular approach, which was still gaining momentum at the point when Gorky tragically took his own life in 1948, would have a significant impact on his contemporaries, especially artists like de Kooning, and would profoundly influence American art in the decades that followed.