Exhibition of the week Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888). Until 3 May

Arshile Gorky is one of the great American Modern masters, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, but, as this show at Tate Modern amply demonstrates, he was probably the "slowest off the mark". It takes 20 years (and four galleries of this show) for him to ''snail his way through the lessons of Cezanne, Picasso and Miro", so my advice to the visitor is to "move briskly through" the exhibition and start with The Artist and His Mother (right). In this, "one of the most powerful portraits of the 20th century", the young Gorky "stands next to his mother like a bridegroom, clasping a posy; she sits erect and contained in the halo of her own outline, archaic as a Byzantine icon". It is based on a photograph taken during Gorky's childhood in Armenia.
Born into a family of prosperous traders, Gorky was originally named Manoog Adoyan. When he was about five, his father emigrated to the US, effectively abandoning the family. The photograph in question was commissioned by Gorky's mother and sent to his father as a reminder of the family's existence. To no avail. Gorky's mother was among the 1.5 million who perished (in her case, of starvation) after the Turks deported Armenians during the First World War. With the help of a relative, in 1920, young Manoog fled to America, where in a few years he turned himself into an artist called Arshile Gorky. The early work is largely derivative, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times.
"The first galleries arc thick with borrowings" - it is only in the 1940s, when Gorky started to paint memories of his childhood, that "he finally found himself". One of his first masterpieces is After Khorkom, refering to the village in which he was born. It is a "brightly coloured choir of blobs scattered vividly with poppy reds and buttercup yellows". The war years also brought Gorky into contact with exiled Surrealists from Europe, and this had an immediate and dramatic effect on his work. "One moment he was working laboriously with thick encrustations of paint, the next he was skimming his canvases with coloured washes." The results are here to see in "rooms filled, gloriously, with master classes in pioneering Abstract Expressionism**. But just as Gorky won "critical recognition, a series of personal disasters took away everything he valued in his life", said Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph. A fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed all his work; he was struck by cancer; his marriage collapsed; and then his neck was broken in a car crash and he could no longer paint. On 21 July, 1948, Gorky hanged himself. It was a huge loss. "Gorky was the link between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, and the passion, enigma and autobiographical dimension of his work influenced Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly." This is an excellent show, "but be warned that it is huge. Take a look at the early galleries, but remember that all the best paintings date from the 1940s.