How I Met Your Mother

I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops, he watched his mother starve to death in 1919 surrounded by fellow refugees. Upon coming to America, he shed his birth name of Vosdanig Adoian and remade himself as Arshile Gorky, taking the same last name as his hero, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had supported the Armenia cause. After years of success as an artist, the stretch from 1946 through 1948 became a sheer hell—a studio fire, rectal cancer, his wife’s infidelity, a car accident resulting in a broken neck and paralyzed painting arm—ceased only by his suicide. The Tate Modern’s exhibition Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective brings the pain, of course, but also the triumph of a man who never left truly left his mother country while bringing modernism to his new one. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How I Met Your Mother."

[Image: Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926-36, 152.4 x 127 cm. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA). © Arshile Gorky Estate.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to and to the Tate Modern for the image above from the exhibition, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, running until May 9, 2010.]

Mountain Range

In the New York City art scene of the 1950s, artists joked that you were either with the “red mountain,” Harold Rosenberg, or with the “green mountain,” Clement Greenberg. Born January 16, 1909, Greenberg helped set the standards of taste for post-war America like few other critics. A failed painter himself, Greenberg (above, photographed in 1972 by Arnold Newman) built an entire system around the idea that traditional ways of painting, including painting recognizable subject matter, were not only passé but dangerous for society. After witnessing the way the Nazis commandeered art and culture for nefarious, propagandistic purposes in World War II, the Jewish Greenberg sought to turn the tide and incite a new way of painting that stressed the individual and freedom over the state and state-enforced control. Such a goal neatly survived the transition into the Cold War period by replacing the fascism of the Nazis with the Communism of the Soviet Union. America, Greenberg asserted, as the beacon of freedom for the world, would also illuminate the path to the next stage in the evolution of art.

For Greenberg, the next stage came in the person of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Works such as Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 (above) epitomized everything that Greenberg wanted for art and culture. While Rosenberg championed Willem de Kooning, Greenberg hitched his wagon to Pollock’s star. Greenberg and Pollock rose together into the cultural firmament. The two names became almost synonymous. Greenberg worked with the U.S. Government to organize international exhibitions of Pollock’s art to counteract the ideological spread of Communism during the 1950s. Unfortunately, Pollock’s messy personal life and chaotic psyche clashed with the fastidious habits of Greenberg. In the movie Pollock, Jeffrey Tambor captures that aspect of Greenberg’s personality beautifully. Pollock the man always interfered with Pollock the abstraction for Greenberg, who wanted an idea free of all baggage.


Greenberg seemingly found this baggage-free type of painting in the next style he championed, which he called Post-Painterly Abstraction but is also known as Color Field painting or Lyrical Abstraction. Many artists in the 1960s left behind the angst of Pollock and took a cooler approach to art that reveled in color and shape with no reference to subject matter, including their own mental state. Morris Louis’ Alpha-Pi (above, from 1960) exemplifies this person-less, subject-less style. Greenberg swayed the taste of contemporary art even further towards abstraction, leaving contrary-minded artists far behind and devoid of any chances of fame. Furious at Greenberg’s stranglehold over the artistic dialogue, Peter Saul painted the critic in 1971 as Clemunteena Gweenburg. Saul’s feminized caricature sits on a palette marked “Abstwack Arts” with a paintbrush extending from his (female) genitals that reads “Hy-Brow Art.” Saul and others saw Greenberg’s move to abstraction not as an escape from fascist circles but as an escape from responsibility to address the wrongs of capitalism and American “democracy.” In their view, Greenberg’s belief in the American way blinded him to its wrongs and drove him to blind others to them as well. Greenberg ruled over the art world for nearly two decades, passing down judgments that still echo in the works of critics influenced by him who set today’s standards. Like a mountain, Greenberg continues to cast a large shadow.

Composing Chaos

With the possible exception of Frida, Salma Hayek’s film of Frida Kahlo’s life and art, Ed Harris’ Pollock, his interpretation of the life and art of Jackson Pollock, may be the finest biopic of a painter ever done. Born January 28, 1912, Pollock lived the myth of the tortured artist, always playing up to the expectations the public had of the crazy artist dubbed by the press as “Jack the Dripper” for his unique abstract expressionist paintings created by dripping and splashing paint. Behind the wild life story and the caricature of the madman blindly flinging paint onto canvas, there is a core of composure beneath the chaos. In works such as Blue Poles Number 11, 1952 (above, from 1952), Pollock grounded the patterns of dripped color with the rhythmic series of horizontal blue lines (the “poles” of the title) using, as Kirk Varnedoe showed in his book on Pollock, a compositional pattern Pollock learned from the regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. In many ways, Pollock’s life careened out of control, thanks mainly to substance abuse and his unstable emotional life, but his art never was a creation of pure chance.

Like the poles that stabilize Blue Poles, Pollock’s marriage to fellow abstract expressionist Lee Krasner helped stabilize his life and allow him to enjoy some success. Works such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (above, from 1950) show the beautiful effects that Pollock’s technique could achieve. Advances in liquid paint made that technique possible, and Pollock’s time assisting David Alfaro Siqueiros helped open his eyes to that potential. Pollock’s drip paintings made such a paradigmatic leap in modern art that nobody really could follow in the same style. Anything else would be condemned as pure imitation. For a style so deceptively easy to the untrained eye, no school of Pollock formed around him. Such isolation only makes his art and his life more fascinating.

The performance aspect of Pollock’s painting continues to intrigue students of his art. Fortunately, Hans Namuth filmed Pollock at work, including innovative shots such as the one above in which Pollock painted on a sheet of glass as Namuth filmed from below, giving a sense of being within the painting as Pollock worked upon it. Unfortunately, such close scrutiny made the already self-conscious artist even more jittery and upset the delicate balance of his life. During his life, Pollock continually felt torn asunder by demands upon his work. The critic Clement Greenberg championed Pollock as the greatest painter of the age, the heir to the long legacy of Western art. Greenberg’s rival critic Harold Rosenberg, meanwhile, proposed Willem de Kooning as the top artist, attempting to generate a rivalry in the press between the artists that didn’t exist in real life between the two friends. Pollock even became the plaything of the United States government during the Cold War as they held his work up as an example of the freedom of American democracy in contrast to the repression of Russian Communism. All of these strains proved too much for Pollock, who lived too fast and died too young while drunk driving. Like James Dean, another icon of the period, it would be difficult to imagine Jackson Pollock living into old age, but it would have been nice to have had the chance.

Beuys Will Be Beuys

Joseph Beuys, one of the most unique figures in 20th century art, celebrated a birthday last Saturday, May 12th. Born in 1921, Beuys played an instrumental role in the development of performance art as we know it today. For that, he’s both an intriguing and an exasperating artist, depending on your point of view. His dedication to teaching and fostering young artists in his native Germany remains unquestioned. (An image of Beuys teaching in his trademark felt hat appears above.)

Beuys lectures were performance art all by themselves. Above is an image of a blackboard on which Beuys diagrammed the serpentine workings of his mind. This board itself now appears at the MoMA as Untitled (Sun State). Everything Beuys did or touched became art in the self-constructed persona he forged.

Beuys fought in the German Luftwaffe in World War II until his bomber was shot down in the Crimea in 1944. In reality, Beuys received care in a German hospital, but in his self-constructed mythos, this crash and his recovery became the origin of his new artist persona. Beuys claimed that Tartar villagers found his wrecked plane and pulled him out, barely alive. These villagers then covered his body in lard and felt for warmth, nursing him back to health.

(The indie comic Cat and Girl pokes fun at Beuys’ creation myth while describing their own creation in flashback. Cat and Girl’s plane crashes into a frozen wasteland, where they are rescued by Eskimo-looking locals. “Lovely lard,” says an appreciative, recovered Cat. “That’s not what happened at all,” argues the Girl. A Zombie Joseph Beuys enters the final panel to say, “Who are you to question Zombie Joseph Beuys?” Zombie Joseph Beuys appears in many Cat and Girl strips, and even received their endorsement for President.)

Beuys opened many doors for the weird and bizarre in performance art. In his How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (above), Beuys walked around a gallery, his face lathered with honey and gold leaf, while carrying a dead hare, to whom he would whisper explanations of the drawings. Poking fun at both critics and the gallery “experience,” Beuys ruffled feathers but at the same time brought fresh air into the sometimes stuffy world of exhibits.

In a move that Suzi Gablik would praise as “reconstructive postmodern practice,” Beuys initiated the 7,000 Oaks project in Kassel, Germany in 1982, which aimed at ultimately planting 7,000 oak trees worldwide, each with an accompanying stone column.

Some critics attack Beuys with charges of glossing over his and Germany’s Nazi past by creating his personal mythos of lard and felt, but I think that Beuys simply took the normal self-mythologizing of the artist to an extreme. As the art critic Harold Rosenberg said, “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.” This “radical interest” of Beuys’ 20th century forced him to create a new self in the name of his new art.