Gorky + Burkhardt
October 2007
Many of the leading American modernists came from abroad. Mark Rothko was born in Latvia, which was Russian territory at the time; John Graham was also Russian by birth, and Willem de Kooning was Dutch. Frederick Kiesler was Austrian, Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers were German and Arshile Gorky came from Armenia. His close friend Isamu Noguchi, half Japanese, though born in California, was raised in Japan. And Gorky’s former studio mate Hans Burkhardt was Swiss. Gorky and Burkhardt first met in 1927, when the latter, who had immigrated to the United States in 1924, enrolled in Gorky’s class at the Grand Central School of Art in New York.Gorky was born Vosdanik Adoian in 1904 to a family of poor farmers in Armenia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I, during the Turkish genocide of Armenians, his family escaped, and during their flight his mother died of starvation. Adoian managed to get to Tiflis and from there, via Greece, to the United States, where he arrived in 1920. Seeking to mold his image in this newly discovered modern world, he fabricated a new identity and named himself Arshile Gorky, claiming a relationship to Maxim Gorky, the great Russian literary figure.
He attended Boston’s New School of Design between 1922 and 1924, and in 1924 became an instructor there. In 1925 Gorky was an assistant instructor at the New School of Design in New York, where Mark Rothko was one of his students. Rothko remembered that art for Gorky was "the single greatest source of happiness" and "rather like an obsession." At that time Gorky copied the Old Masters and taught their techniques. He would discourse on Uccello, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, color reproductions of whose works were hanging on his studio walls.
It was modernism, however, that was most important to him. He had to assimilate modern art. In 1925 he was painting Impressionist landscapes and then works in the manner of Cézanne, whom he once called "the greatest artist that ever lived." Next, he had to absorb Picasso and Cubism, telling a fellow artist, "I feel Picasso running in my fingertips," and painting a series of Synthetic Cubist still lifes that transformed Picasso’s shapes into his own more organic ones with thicker pigments.
By 1930 Joan Miró’s biomorphic abstraction became important to him, as did Wassily Kandinsky’s spontaneous fluid abstractions, which he saw at the Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Guggenheim Museum). The eminent art historian Meyer Schapiro remarked that Gorky’s career "was remarkable as a development from what seemed like servile imitation of other painters to a high originality."
Gorky was the link between modernist European art and American Abstract Expressionism. But he not only prefigured what was to come, he also created art that prompted the critic Peter Schjeldahl to write, "For the greatest American artist of the first half of the 20th century, I nominate Arshile Gorky." The forthcoming Gorky retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will allow us to reassess his work. This is also the time to focus on the productive association between him and Burkhardt, who was first his student and then his friend and colleague, a painter with whom he shared his studio for nine years that were critical for both artists.
Burkhardt first encountered Gorky when the Armenian was still searching for his own style. The two immigrants had many things in common. They were born in the same year. Both their fathers had immigrated to America, leaving behind their infant sons. After Burkhardt’s mother died when he was 6, he was brought up in an appalling Dickensian orphanage in Basel. Like Gorky, he followed his father to America, arriving in New York in 1924, where he first worked in a high-style furniture factory. In 1925–26 he took his first classes in commercial art at Cooper Union. A year later he enrolled at the Grand Central School of Art, where Gorky was teaching. Gorky quickly recognized Burkhardt’s talent, awarding him a prize for drawing and shortly thereafter, in 1928, inviting Burkhardt to his studio to study with him privately. Burkhardt remembered Gorky as being "like a wild man, bursting through class. So much energy ... He was teaching me how to see and think for myself ... He really opened my eyes to abstraction."Gorky’s "Abstraction with a Palette" (1930) clearly indicates his absorption of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubist paintings and collages, which he would have seen in catalogues and in reproductions in Cahiers d’Art, a leading contemporary art publication. In the same year Burkhardt produced a painting, "Abstract Still Life," that shares the flatness of space and the composition of overlapping shapes, which are non-figurative except for the emphasis on the painter’s palette. Burkhardt’s multicolored painting is smaller and also more compact in its configuration. Both artists were only 26 years old and still at an early stage in their careers.
In 1931 Gorky stopped teaching at Grand Central but still gave instruction at his studio after he moved from Washington Square to a larger place on Union Square. Burkhardt, who continued working at the furniture factory, would come to work in Gorky’s studio on Saturdays and weekday evenings, and Gorky even gave him a key to the studio. Being gainfully employed, Burkhardt was able to help his friend financially and would leave groceries at his studio. On occasion he would buy a work, and he also acquired a good many paintings and drawings that Gorky had planned to destroy or discard, which today offer valuable insights into Gorky’s artistic development. In time Burkhardt assembled an impressive collection of early Gorkys, many of which he would later donate to museums. Those not gifted to museums are now in Burkhardt’s estate, administered by the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles, and are currently on view at the University of Virginia Art Museum; the latest of several recent museum exhibitions of this collection.
Gorky’s studio had "an atmosphere so beautiful that I got a little dizzy," recalled de Kooning, who made his living as a commercial artist at the time and would drop in at Gorky’s place in the evenings. The three immigrants—Gorky, de Kooning and Burkhardt—were the same age, but Gorky was ahead of them artistically, probably because he had been studying the European masters with such diligence. De Kooning called him "our master," and later said, "He knew more. There is no doubt that he was the boss." Gorky, in turn, was well aware of his two friends’ talents and said to Burkhardt, "Hans, out of all the young artists, I have faith in you two."
They continued absorbing the Cubist paintings of Picasso. Going back to Synthetic Cubism, Picasso had produced two significant pictures in the late 1920s: "The Studio" (1927–28) and "Painter and Model" (1928), which had come to New York and were at Valentine Dudensing’s gallery and Sidney Janis’ home, respectively, and were accessible to artists such as Gorky and Burkhardt. The Valentine Dudensing Gallery, later to be known simply as the Valentine Gallery, was a pioneering venue of modern art. Sidney Janis, a collector who had sought Gorky’s counsel early on, went on to open a major gallery where he exhibited Gorky’s works.
Gorky’s "Organization," a painting he worked on from about 1934 to 1936, was modeled after these two Picassos. The composition is similar in the emphasis of geometric forms, as well as in the color scheme and the two-dimensional design. Gorky put many layers of pigment on this canvas as he reworked it over a period of several years. He posed for a photo in front of it with de Kooning and was proud to have it shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1936. Burkhardt’s "Artist and Model" (1936–37) is also done in heavy impastos. It relates more closely to Picasso’s "Painter and Model," with the model now rendered as a blue, bird-like form on the right. The same hue is used for the conspicuous palette, which is again central in the painting. But, instead of the relatively spare use of color, Burkhardt’s painting literally bursts with coloration.
During this period Gorky painted several portraits of his comrade, such as "Portrait of Hans Burkhardt" (1934), which shows a thoughtful 30-year-old painter holding his palette and looking out at the viewer. There were at least two canvases that were done jointly by the two painters. "Circus (Composition)" (1936) is signed by Burkhardt, but as the Gorky scholar Melvin Lader has pointed out, several passages are clearly Gorky’s. "Gorky’s participation is well-documented, and, in fact, a couple of motifs are most assuredly his." Lader points to the shape of a bird or an animal’s head in the lower center and compares it to Gorky’s "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia" series, observing that the green oval shape with its red "eye" was a "common motif Gorky incorporated in numerous paintings and drawings of the 1934–36 period."Another canvas done jointly is "Abstraction (Conflicting Emotions)" (1936–37). There is the Picasso-like woman’s head, which was probably Gorky’s. The biomorphic, phallic object that confronts the head may well be Burkhardt’s, as is the grey slab on the lower left. The outrageous green that pervades the picture might be Gorky’s, as a similar color occurs in several of his pictures. The whole painting is redolent of conflict, and, indeed, both painters went through serious marital difficulties at that time. As a result, Burkhardt left New York for Los Angeles in 1937, soon after this painting was completed. In those economically difficult times, Hollywood studios offered possibilities for artists. Modern art, however, was barely considered in Los Angeles, as compared to New York.
In the years following Burkhardt’s departure, Gorky continued to make ever more vibrant and penetrating paintings, as concrete forms gave way to new painterly and fluid abstractions. In 1945 the "Pope" of Surrealism, André Breton, wrote that Gorky "found a code by reason of his sensitive anterior expressions, that can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life." Burkhardt, too, was privileged to find such a pictorial language. Having assimilated the biomorphic form, he produced paintings such as "Symphony" (1936–37), in which humanoid and zoomorphic beings are engaged in an animated dance, or, after having left New York, "Day and Night" (1937–38), with amorphous, bird-like shapes of pure fantasy.
The Los Angeles in which Burkhardt found himself lacked the community of avant-garde artists who were part of his New York environment. He was by himself now, and it was he who brought Abstract Expressionism to California. By 1939 he had a solo exhibition at the prestigious Stendahl Gallery, arranged by his friend Lorser Feitelson, who championed modern art in Los Angeles as an artist and influential teacher.
In the 1940s, Gorky suffered considerable hardships, including the loss of a number of works to fire, colon cancer, an automobile accident that immobilized his painting arm, and further marital crises. Gorky committed suicide in 1948, and afterward, Burkhardt continued to acknowledge his great debt to Gorky and paid him tribute by painting two plaintive, carefully composed versions of "Studio of Gorky." And during his sojourn in Mexico in 1950 he painted three versions of "The Burial of Gorky" (1950). In this sorrowful painting in blacks, grays and dark reds, three columnar pallbearers carry the solemn body of the deceased in a funeral cortege.
By this time Burkhardt had achieved independence from his mentor. This may have come about when he turned to the horrendous events of his time as subjects for some of his work. Beginning in 1938, Burkhardt addressed the subject of war in response to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, not yet aware of Picasso’s famous picture. In an interview with the art critic Colin Gardner, he said, "The anti-war paintings were probably the first works that are truly my own. Before that I still made paintings that had influence." And, indeed, this protean humanist artist engaged with the horrors and cruelties of his time: the Nazi death camps, the Vietnam War, and, when he was almost 90, the Persian Gulf War, producing a series of paintings called "Desert Storms," and then his final works, "Black Rain." Writing about these, the critic Donald Kuspit affirmed, "These are not just great paintings, they are the work of a master ... I knew it had to exist in American paintings, and here it is."
EVENTS
The Arshile Gorky retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be on view Oct. 8, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010. The show will travel to the Tate Modern (Feb. 3–May 9, 2010) and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 6–Sept. 6, 2010).
"Arshile Gorky: Drawings, The Early Years," now through Oct. 28, 2007, at the University of Virginia Art Museum. 434.924.3592.
Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, a distinguished museum curator and author of more than 20 books, including The Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, which was honored with the College Art Association’s best art history book award in 2007. During his curatorial tenure at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he brought to greater light many major artists; among them were Mark Rothko, Max Beckmann, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Sam Francis and innumerable contemporary artists.