A conversation on Arshile Gorky

SS: Do you remember your father painting?

MG: When we were living in Connecticut, I was allowed to paint on the back of his canvases. Then I would work my way towards the front and try to change what he was doing: then he would throw me out of the studio, fling me onto the grass outside. But he definitely encouraged me. By the time I was three, I had a lot of equipment, a real little easel and canvas and artist’s paints. However, I didn’t have beautiful artist’s crayons, like Gorky had. I had Crayola. His were special, grand, expensive artist’s ones that came in a special black and white box. I remember he sharpened his pencils with a knife in a rather public fashion, but he also had a very good pencil sharpener that was latched onto his table. We would spend hours making beautiful whirligigs of pencil wood—they’d fall like carnations onto the table. I remember him showing me how to sharpen my pencils. Very important.

SS: Wow. Is this the enchantment of childhood, of being an artist, or Gorky himself?

MG: I hero-worshipped him. I thought he was a magician of some sort. For instance, I was convinced he threw a ball high into the sky over the cement park, and it never came back down! I was always a little scared of balls, and I was simply amazed at how brilliant he was at making a red ball disappear into the blue sky.

SS: The disappearing disappointment! Your father protected you from the ball, by throwing it away upward?

MG: [laughs] Maybe it landed on a branch and stayed there, in a crow’s nest.

SS: When you paint you show many colors in the landscape, just as Gorky does in his drawings. Do you see all those colors when you look at a landscape?

MG: The colors conjure a feeling that is there, in the landscape, maybe in each different tree. It’s not like a photograph that captures what is visible, a good landscape captures the feelings of being there, at that moment. It’s more like a map, the different shapes of the feelings.

CS: You have synaesthesia. Do you think he had it too?

MG: I think he did. Lots of artists have synaesthesia. And then don’t forget that he was also into artists like Paolo Uccello, Hieronymus Bosch and others. What artists do, is they look at art from the past, they copy, they learn a shape, and they repeat it. It becomes part of their vocabulary and their language. Right now it’s been discovered that van Gogh was influenced by Ruskin, when he did that very beautiful painting of a reflection of streetlights and a starry night in water. He was in London and working in an art gallery, seeing masses of art, and was a friend of Ruskin. Odd, but true.

CS: And Gorky really inhabited the artists he chose to copy. He drew from their work, and drew an inference into how they felt about their world.

MG: Yes. We know this because we have little details from other artworks that Gorky copied in his sketchbooks. There’s that elbow of a painting by Brueghel—or one of those Dutch artists… Matthew knows better. Where is Matthew?

Matthew Spender: Here.

SS: Tell us a bit about Gorky’s painting process.

MS: The real breakthrough years were 1943–1944, when he did a lot of drawings from nature. I see it as an attempt to rediscover in nature the shapes and ideas that he’d found in Surrealist paintings, above all Matta’s, but also in Tanguy, Miró, and Kandinsky. It’s as if he is looking at nature through their eyes, and he is trying to corroborate what he knows from them, in nature—which is quite an extraordinary approach, when you think Breton was interested in exploring the mind, not nature.

SS: The Surrealists were trying to bring all the other experiences people have into their paintings. Nature is quite a big subject, and possibly includes the mind.

MS: The Surrealists wanted to get away from painting from nature, from what the Impressionists called ‘le motif.’ Matta spoke of ‘inscapes’ rather than ‘landscapes.’

MG: It’s a conflation of the imagination and the landscape...

SS: This is a very familiar conversation.

MG: In this house, we have spoken about these things until we’ve gone blue in the face. You know everything there is to know, even better than us. Remember that famous time when you were four years old, and you came out from under the table, and you said ‘Hmmm, Baudelaire, I’ve heard that name before. Was he one of your mother’s lovers?’ Matthew: Oh yes, you must put that story in somewhere.

CS: I think we are going off topic here. Off-piste! MG: I must say you are both looking very fetching right there in the computer. When are you coming for Easter? When do all your children arrive?

SS: One of them is coming to you tomorrow evening. You’re picking her up from the station at Montevarchi, remember?

Works by Arshile Gorky will be included in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel showcasing the very best work from the gallery’s contemporary artists as well as masterpieces of the early 20th century, 13 – 16 June 2019.