The Grand Group Dance

...His struggles were crowned by retrospectives at the Venice Biennale in 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in 1963 and the Tate Gallery in 1965...

...The tradition of art is the grand group dance of beauty and pathos," he wrote, "in which the many individual centuries join in the effort and thereby communicate their particular contributions to the whole event...

...A number of his works were destroyed in a fire at his studio...

...he affirmed that he imitated Picasso "on almost a moral basis...

...Cancer of the rectum left the passionate, vain artist's alimentary canal voiding into a colostomy bag...

...Gorky's subsequent development was affected in ways he could not have foreseen by his marriage, on September 15, 1941, to Agnes Magruder, the defiant daughter of a Navy captain...

...In 1946, Gorky, who believed he had been suffering from hemorrhoids, was diagnosed with cancer...

...He was too tall, too loud, and the line between irony and aggression was hard for [others] to spot," writes Spender...

...Spender also mentions that Gorky originally considered naming himself "Archie Colt" or "Archie Gunn," and it should be noted that concealed at one remove behind the name he did choose was that of another firearm, the Maxim gun...

...Three years later, when she died of starvation in the Georgian city of Tiflis, he made his way to Watertown, Massachusetts, where his father had been living for some time...

...Gorky had come into his own...

...Born Vosdanik Manoog Adoian in 1904 in Kharkom, the future artist escaped the 1915 Ottoman massacres of Armenians by crossing into southern Russia with his mother...

...It was a tense moment for Gorky's peers...

...And yet, a friend told the author, he was submissive before those he admired...

...After Gorky's one-man show at the Julian Levy Gallery four months prior to his death, Clement Greenberg wrote that Gorky had finally "taken his place among the very few contemporary American painters whose work is of more than national importance...

...Reviewed by Richard Lamb Some six years before his death at age 44 in 1948, Arshile Gorky began producing the haunting, richly colored biomorphic abstractions he is remembered for...

...Here the artist, who had not been in the countryside since leaving Armenia, was overcome by the surrounding lushness...

...Until the early '30s Gorky spelled his first name "Arshel...

...The paintings produce in the viewer a deep and contradictory impression of vitality and despair and loveliness...

...It is generally believed that the painter's wife abandoned him shortly thereafter...

...Then, in 1939, came a glimmer of rebellion...

...The idea suited Gorky, who tended to pass through phases of infatuation with a particular artist, the first of whom was Cézanne...

...On the morning of July 21,1948, he was found hanging from his already broken neck in his studio in Sherman, Connecticut...

...If they faced the fact openly, they might, as a group, think up a response...

...In the end Spender's Gorky ascends to that pure, romanticized circle of theartist's paradise: posthumous vindication...

...Having set up a meeting with his friend the painter Roberto Matta in Central Park, Gorky accused him of being Mougouch's lover and set out to brain him, although his own head was enclosed in a complicated brace to protect his broken vertebrae...

...Around this time, too, he became friends with John Graham, a Russian painter actually born Ivan Dombrowsky, who had a taste for fabricating the past that Gorky shared...

...This Gorky could offer in spades...

...In contrast to Graham's viruperativeness, though, Gorky had a poetic mode of expression...

...Something quite new and miraculous is resulting, which has meant great exhilaration and of course much tearing of the hair and despair, for what he is doing is entirely new for him and at times he feels like a drowning man," wrote Mougouch to an aunt...

...As for his adopted last name, Spender opts for a simple borrowing from Maxim Gorky (whose actual surname was Peshkov...

...When his wife met his sister Vartoosh, he would not let the two talk alone, lest some previously unknown bit of information be exchanged...

...When he was criticized for this by a young artist who visited his studio, he did not react defensively...

...Graham's fabrications were more imaginative...

...But Gorky never got what he most wanted, a positive review from a now forgotten cntic for the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell...

...He had no ballast against art...

...Spender's portrait of Gorky's last days is of a man unhinged...

...Ironically, however, it was one of the perks of the haute bourgeoisie that helped lead to Gorky's breakthrough...

...One of Graham's chief tenets was that "originality" should be avoided at all costs because it was the "cheap trick of an ignorant and vulgar yokel...

...The soloist can emerge only after having participated in the group dance...

...His wife left him, taking their two daughters...

...Fascinating, even admirable though Gorky may have been as a man," we are told about an early romance, "to be an object of his love was almost indistinguishable from being its victim...

...Shortly afterward he set up his studio in a former ballroom on East 16th Street off Union Square...

...Captain Magruder owned a farm in Virginia where Arshile and his wife spent two summers in the lap of his sometimes uncomprehending in-laws...

...Several sections begin with the phrase "Gorky roamed the streets for hours...

...Moreover, Gorky treated his wife with an old-world possessiveness, forbidding her the freedom that had led her to him in the first place...

...With titles such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb, they brought together his surrealist's preoccupation with plumbing the psyche, and his nearly lifelong devotions at the altars of Mirò and Picasso...

...Nearby he had written, "Good-bye my loves...

...Mougouch," as he called her, was a willful and cosmopolitan young woman who had been educated in Switzerland and was enamored of the idea of sharing an artist's life...

...Contrary to the immediate emphasis on their abstract qualities, Spender reiterates that these paintings are scenes drawn from the painter's childhood, like the curious village ritual he wrote about in describing his Garden in Sochi: "Often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependent breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock...

...A car accident paralyzed his painting hand and broke his neck...

...In 1925 Arshile moved to New York, where he studied, then taught, at the Grand Central School of Art, founded in 1922 by an American Impressionist, Edward Greacen...

...Many of his extended family had settled there and held down comparatively lucrative factoryjobs...

...Eventually he would be canonized as a towering precursor to Abstract Expressionism, a figure who straddled the art world's shift from the Eurocentric School of Paris to the young Turks of the erupting School of New York...

...The biographer is perhaps too sympathetic to his mother-in-law, and leaves the reader to realize that Gorky was probably right...

...Where Gorky claimed he was Russian and, in a touchingly prosaic twist, said he had studied engineering at Brown, Graham claimed he fought against the Bolsheviks and was an expert on all forms of modern, ancient and prehistoric art as well as the occult and artillery warfare...

...That, argues Spender, was derived from "Aysaharel," an Armenian word meaning "possessed by an evil spirit...

...But for Spender, Arshile's apotheosis came during the second show, when the writer and his wife "were overcome by a hilarious sense of triumph at seeing 'Gorky at MoMA' on the side of a crosstown bus...

...He always displayed an articulate and pugnacious willingness to speak on behalf of his beliefs...

...But Spender offers a more nuanced picture of the proud and withdrawn artist withdrawing even further and, in particular, spurning any attempt to help him with the now perilous process of digestion and elimination...

...Still, he does suggest that whatever Mougouch felt for Matta, it was a palliative for her own feeling of being shut out of Gorky's life by his increasing rage, paranoia and self-disgust...

...Over the next couple of years he would rework the sketches made during those two summers into the paintings that form the basis of his reputation...

...The young newcomer, however, affected a cape and insisted he was going to be an artist who would sign his paintings "Arshile Gorky.' The name is generally taken to mean "Achilles the bitter one," but biographer Matthew Spender makes matters more complicated...

...Indeed, his entire life seemed to crumble around him as his art coalesced...

...Gorky spent most of his career worshiping Picasso...

...Gorky called a meeting at Willem de Kooning's studio "to announce that they should all admit they were 'defeated' by Picasso...

...As Spender puts it, "The critics may have seen in retrospect an exciting new phase in American art, but at the time the artists saw themselves as desperate people willing to try one last throw...

...Hisportrait of thepainter thus benefits from intimate information, especially given that Gorky utilized the full repertoire of stonewalling and prevarication to conceal his personality...

...He dominated any group, in cafés or museums or at the opening of a colleague's show...

...An abdominoperineal resection was performed...

...The works summed up, too, his belief that abstract art "could be taken to pieces and analyzed in the same way in which one could analyze a fugue by Bach...

...Matthew Spender, the son of Stephen Spender, is married to Gorky's daughter, Maro...