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From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky, one of the most intriguing figures in modern art, was at the center of the New York art world in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Yet he was never fully recognized as an important painter in his lifetime, and it was only after his death that his reputation soared. In this deeply felt and penetrating biography, Matthew Spender--himself a sculptor and the husband of Gorky's elder daughter--writes with extraordinary sympathy and perception, and he gets to the heart of his elusive subject.
Born in Khorkom, a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky grew up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying the scars of the 1896 Turkish massacres of his people; then the mass slaughter of 1915 from which his own family fled; the desertion of his father; the dominance of his headstrong and loving mother, who died of starvation after they found shelter in the Caucasus.
Making his way to the United States, the young Gorky determined against all odds to become a painter. He buried his past by assuming a new name and identity, and brazened his way into the art world. At once charming and peremptory, seemingly an extrovert but secretive at heart, he could both dazzle and alienate his art students (Rothko was one of his earliest), his fellow painters, and his young loves, as well as potential dealers and patrons.
In telling Gorky's story, Matthew Spender gives us the most illuminating picture of the New York art scene that has yet been written--from the affluent twenties, when the Ash Can school was emerging, to the depressed thirties, which marked the high point of Gorky's career, when he painted a huge abstract mural for Newark Airport. During the explosive postwar years, Gorky withdrew into a world of increasing solitude, even as Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, was championing him, along with other artist friends like Willem de Kooning, Roberto Matta, and Isamu Noguchi. His last years, dogged by tragedy and illness, threatened even the haven of his marriage and family, until finally, in 1948, he took his own life.
With his artist's eye, Matthew Spender helps us to see what lies behind the paintings--to recognize in the abstraction, for instance, the onion with feathers that hung from a cross above the fire pit in Gorky's childhood home in Khorkom. Above all, Spender understands the enormity of Gorky's sense of isolation in an America he did not fully understand, and that his need to invent the imaginary artist was what sustained his paintings. It is the perfect conjunction of writer and subject that makes this biography so rich in insight and so compelling as a human document.
Born in Khorkom, a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky grew up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying the scars of the 1896 Turkish massacres of his people; then the mass slaughter of 1915 from which his own family fled; the desertion of his father; the dominance of his headstrong and loving mother, who died of starvation after they found shelter in the Caucasus.
Making his way to the United States, the young Gorky determined against all odds to become a painter. He buried his past by assuming a new name and identity, and brazened his way into the art world. At once charming and peremptory, seemingly an extrovert but secretive at heart, he could both dazzle and alienate his art students (Rothko was one of his earliest), his fellow painters, and his young loves, as well as potential dealers and patrons.
In telling Gorky's story, Matthew Spender gives us the most illuminating picture of the New York art scene that has yet been written--from the affluent twenties, when the Ash Can school was emerging, to the depressed thirties, which marked the high point of Gorky's career, when he painted a huge abstract mural for Newark Airport. During the explosive postwar years, Gorky withdrew into a world of increasing solitude, even as Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, was championing him, along with other artist friends like Willem de Kooning, Roberto Matta, and Isamu Noguchi. His last years, dogged by tragedy and illness, threatened even the haven of his marriage and family, until finally, in 1948, he took his own life.
With his artist's eye, Matthew Spender helps us to see what lies behind the paintings--to recognize in the abstraction, for instance, the onion with feathers that hung from a cross above the fire pit in Gorky's childhood home in Khorkom. Above all, Spender understands the enormity of Gorky's sense of isolation in an America he did not fully understand, and that his need to invent the imaginary artist was what sustained his paintings. It is the perfect conjunction of writer and subject that makes this biography so rich in insight and so compelling as a human document.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 28, 2014
Andrew Solomon of the NYT enjoyed this book, but with reservations. He felt that ultimately Matthew Spender was not up to the task of portraying the full extent of Gorky's passion and torment; in his words Spender writing of Gorky was like casting Hugh Grant as King Lear. Imagining this gave me a good subsonic laugh that lasted a few days.
But screw that snarky critic and his implied one-dimensional assessment of Gorky. Spender, who happens to be Gorky's posthumous son-in-law, portrayed Gorky's final King Learian six weeks without the myth and bombast that perhaps Mr. Solomon was looking for, but with trememdous empathy and restrained emotion. Upon reading of his final torments and suicide I had to stare misy-eyed out the coffee shop's plate glass window, into a grey misty sky, to collect myself in sad revery.
Gorky's best paintings are the result of analytical emotions - not emotions rationally analyzed by intellect, but emotions with the ability to analyze themselves through the tools of art - so that the final product has a controlled objective quality that only barely contains the raw seething and ever-living emotions embodied within them. This book, to the best of its ability, presents the human matrix behind Gorky's "abstract" works that reveal them to be very human documents of an analytical imagination confronting the world without resorting to the truly abstract functionings of a self-protective rationalism.
Spender's direct and decades-long access to family stories and family memories allowed him to portray a fully human very contradictory and conflicted Gorky in a patient, leisurely way. This book was as if written from the inside out - a portrait of Gorky from the intimacy of the family circle - and in doing so was able to potray the process of getting to the roots (or near them) of Gorky's self-mythologizing and lies that even his wife and children had to undergo after his death.
But screw that snarky critic and his implied one-dimensional assessment of Gorky. Spender, who happens to be Gorky's posthumous son-in-law, portrayed Gorky's final King Learian six weeks without the myth and bombast that perhaps Mr. Solomon was looking for, but with trememdous empathy and restrained emotion. Upon reading of his final torments and suicide I had to stare misy-eyed out the coffee shop's plate glass window, into a grey misty sky, to collect myself in sad revery.
Gorky's best paintings are the result of analytical emotions - not emotions rationally analyzed by intellect, but emotions with the ability to analyze themselves through the tools of art - so that the final product has a controlled objective quality that only barely contains the raw seething and ever-living emotions embodied within them. This book, to the best of its ability, presents the human matrix behind Gorky's "abstract" works that reveal them to be very human documents of an analytical imagination confronting the world without resorting to the truly abstract functionings of a self-protective rationalism.
Spender's direct and decades-long access to family stories and family memories allowed him to portray a fully human very contradictory and conflicted Gorky in a patient, leisurely way. This book was as if written from the inside out - a portrait of Gorky from the intimacy of the family circle - and in doing so was able to potray the process of getting to the roots (or near them) of Gorky's self-mythologizing and lies that even his wife and children had to undergo after his death.
June 15, 2010
This is an excellent and informative biography on one my favorite modern artists, Arshile Gorky. If you have any idea who he is you should read this book. It is extremely well written and gives a great history of his life and passion and how it all turned suddenly into pain.
And don't forget to actually search out his work. His late oil paintings are very lyrical and emotive. He is in many major collections but you may have to look to find him.
And don't forget to actually search out his work. His late oil paintings are very lyrical and emotive. He is in many major collections but you may have to look to find him.
July 7, 2010
Strangely incomplete bio of the great Armenian-American painter. Lot's of good info, but I don't feel the author ever really gets at who Gorky was was. Read this as a companion for the Gorky retrospective that's currently at the MOMA in L.A. Have to admit that reading it did add much to my experience at the show.
February 21, 2010
This was an easy book to read and there seems to be some renewed interest in Gorky with the Tate Modern hosting a retrospective this Spring.
September 24, 2012
This is actually an excellent biography, but Gorky's life was so tortured, I just couldn't finish the book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews