by Leo Kent

The intriguingly titled 'The Liver is the Cocks Comb' (1944)

For an artist who paved the way for Abstract Expressionism in America, Armenian born Arshile Gorky should be more of a household name today. Hopefully this will be rectified in some small way by this retrospective at Tate Modern.

It is true that he was a late bloomer, taking twenty years between 1920 and 1940 until his work became truly original. The two decades of painting up to this point are more concerned with him learning his craft, of imitating the greats before finding his own voice. With this in mind it seems unnecessary that over half this exhaustive exhibition is devoted to the first twenty years.  You can hear people muttering as they pass through the first seven rooms, ‘oh there’s a Picasso, there’s a Miro’ etc. It is not until room 8 that the mutterings die down as Gorky as an artist in his own right begins to emerge. However room seven, entitled ‘The Artist and his Mother’, though perhaps not representing Gorky as an originator, nevertheless contains a few of the most poignant paintings. There are two versions of the ‘Artist and His Mother’, based on a photo of Gorky as a young boy standing next to his sitting mother. The paintings are almost identical. Your eye is drawn to the expressions on their faces as the extremities turn to amorphous blobs. The only difference in the two versions is that in the first his mother’s countenance is stern and resilient but in the latter, with her mouth downtunred, there is a desperate sense of resignation.

Born in Turkish Armenia, his family was forced to flee into Russian territory to escape the ensuing genocide against the Armenians in 1915. While in Russian controlled Armenia his mother starved to death. This personal tragedy is something that informed his art throughout his life and shrouds many works with a certain sense  of nostalgic gloom.

At the beginning of the 1940s Gorky started painting landscapes whilst living on Crooked Run Farm in Virginia, which through his eyes turned into warped, alien panoramas with thrashes of colour set off against white spaces. It is a marked difference from his previous incarnations with his Picasso pastiches and wannabe Miros. Many of his earlier paintings are layered with oils, due to his obsessive reworking. They are so thickly applied that the surface positively sticks out at you. His friend, Surrealist leader Andre Breton encouraged him on to become more wild and free-flowing. It is in this period that you begin to understand why Gorky is considered the forefather of Abstract Expressionism. Without his output of the next eight years the work of Pollock and De Kooning would be unimaginable.

Moving into the mid 1940s the colours and shapes get wilder and more outlandish. ‘One Year the Milkweed’ in 1944 depicts phallic shapes covered by dripping paint as if the picture has been rained upon. Cy Twombly owes a lot to Gorky, the patchy graffiti style with pencil lines mixed in with stained yellows in ‘The Plough and the Song’ are testament to this.

The last few years of his life were trying to say the least. In 1946 a fire in his studio destroyed a years worth of work. A month later he was diagnosed with cancer. ‘Agony’ painted in 1947, ablaze with fiery reds overpowering contorted shapes looks like a modern representation of hell. It is most likely an ode to the lost paintings of the fire. Next door to ‘Agony’ is ‘Soft Night’ covered in a blanket of grey but with similar forms to ‘Agony’ suggesting the desolate aftermath of the fire. Following a car crash that temporarily paralysed his painting arm and his wife leaving him he could take no more and in 1948 he hanged himself leaving a short note that read, “Goodbye, my loveds.”

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective runs at Tate Modern until 3 May.