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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Arshile Gorky in New York
00:26:13
A new exhibition celebrates 100 years since artist Arshile Gorky moved to New York.
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Saskia Spender
All right, unk.
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Cosima Spender
Welcome to McDonald's.
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Alison Stewart
Can I take your order, miss?
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Sling TV Advertiser
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. It's gallery season in New York with openings happening every night. So we're going to look at a few of the many. Gina Bevers will be here on Friday. Wangari Mathenge will be here tomorrow. And today we start with an anniversary exhibit. 100 years ago this fall, a young refugee and aspiring artist decided to change his name and move to New York. The artist who chose the name Arshil Gorky would go on to be one of the most influential abstract expressionists of his time, even when his life was tragically cut short. A new Hauser and Wirth exhibit celebrates the centennial of Gorky's New York move by presenting several works from different periods of his life, including a painting only discovered recently that was hidden behind another work on paper. Arshil Gorky's New York City is on view starting today at 134 Worcester street through November 2nd. And with me now are two sisters and granddaughters of Gharkey Gorky. Excuse me. Saskia Spender, president of the Arsheel Gorky Foundation. Nice to see you. Saskia. Hi. And Cosima Spender, director, producer and writer of the documentary Documentary Without Gorky. Nice to see you.
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Cosima Spender
Nice to be here.
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Alison Stewart
We also want to let people know there will be a special screening of the film at Hauser and Wirth on 18th at 7pm Excuse me. September 7th at 3pm we're so happy to have you at WNYC. This exhibit was inspired by the 100th anniversary of Arshiel Gorky moving to New York in 1924. And it was also time he changed his name. Sasia, what was the context of his life that inspired him to come to New York and to change his name?
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Saskia Spender
Gorky first got here as a child refugee. As you mentioned in 1919. Yeah, 1919. And spent four years in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he had some relatives, a half sister in the community. But he actually found it difficult to be an artist in his family's context. They were not artistic people. They had had a lot of experiences of life that seemed the best and the worst of humanity. And he went to Boston first, but very soon he felt that he really needed to divest himself of his patri lineage and his family and really be his own person. And so he came to New York City because which better place to start your life as an artist? And it was open to people from all over the world.
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Alison Stewart
When he was in New York, he establishes a studio at 36 Union Square East. What was the energy and the environment of his studio surrounding Union Square during this time? Cosima?
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Cosima Spender
Yes, his studios. He had one in Washington Square and then one in Union Square. And it's where he really processed everything, everything he was learning from the city, the city's museums, like the Met, where he went. And he was really self taught. And he looked at Uccello, Grunewald, Cezanne, Seurat, Picasso, and the studios were very beautiful. He was obsessed with cleanliness. It was a very aesthetic studio, very simple, very open space with just a table and a large easel. There's very few photos of the studio, but a lot of artists came in and out of the studio and. And there was a vibrant community of immigrants. He hung out with John Graham, Stuart Davis, de Kooning, Rothko, and they all would meet around the city in quick and dirties and the museums. And it was a very, very vibrant community. Despite the 30s being so hard, the artists were very active politically and also involved in the WPA Federal works, which saw a lot of construction. And New York was this very exciting city, very vertical city with a lot of construction taking place.
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Alison Stewart
Saskia, as Kazmi mentioned, he was self taught. What indication do we have as to why he wanted to be an artist?
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Saskia Spender
Well, his family says he always was an artist and had been drawing in the sand, on the lakes of. On the shores of the Lake Van where he grew up. But in the city, he saw art everywhere. On the sidewalks, on the textures of paint, on the peeling signs. And really the way of his way of seeing was an artist's way of seeing. And then whilst he was here, although he already knew how to draw, he really developed his personal iconography. He chose certain images from that he found in the museums and in the galleries that spoke to him and that created his family of artists, his own chosen lineage of artists. And he really chose people from all eras and all parts of the world and even all different mediums, because for him, this was really a way of mastering the line and the hand and really learning to express his experience in a very personal way. And in fact, the exhibition that we're having now that I see it all up, and I see these 17 works up, I see that the first half is really about the mastery of the line, and then the second half is really his emancipation from the line. And it's really interesting to see how even his themes change over time, but some of them recur throughout. And this is very typical of Gorky, that it really was a very personal. His idea of being an artist was a very personal thing. He tried to get involved with more collective movements, whether political, artistic, or even familial or ethnic. And for a while, you could see that his impulse was to join the communities. But his ultimate thing is such an individual thing of a person alone in the city, where he was able to be free and do what he wanted to do.
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Alison Stewart
Cosme, to your point, though, New York had so much art around it, so many museums, so many galleries that he could go to. What spaces did he like to visit? Who were some of the artists that he liked to study?
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Cosima Spender
Yes, he spent a lot of time in the Met. In fact, when our grandmother met him and recounted these stories to us, you know, she would talk about his obsession with going to the Met, where he could see Coptic art, he could see the Fayoum portraits, he could see all sorts of art on his doorstep. And that's where he learned. He learned really by copying. And then after that, he became his own person, and the works became more fluid and more personal. Really in the 40s, in the 30s, it was very much more about. Influenced by. From. By the city itself and the lines that he saw in the city. And then once he met our grandmother and he had more chances to escape the city and go to the countryside. He then reconnected with nature. I mean, he had been to Central park, obviously, and had drawn nature even here in New York. But then he would come back from those trips to the countryside to his studios in New York. And that's when he did his canvases, after all the preparatory drawings which had been done in Planner in the Countryside.
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WNYC Host/Producer
Saskia, who do you see in his work?
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Saskia Spender
I see everyone. I see the past and I see the future. There was something incredibly contemporary about his rejection of originality and teaching himself from all era, but also from Art magazines of the time. And there are references from the Renaissance, from Japanese prints, from tapestries. And this is a very contemporary approach. Both the fact that he was self taught and that he was so eclectic in finding his antecedents through history. And one of the cool things we've done for this exhibition is a map of the places that he frequented and the galleries, the galleries that were opening at that time. So you can see that the art world was beginning to establish itself Mid Town around 53rd street, whilst he gravitated with his fellow artists around Union Square. And we're doing a digital version of this where you can see the city change as well as all the artists who live in New York at that time.
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Alison Stewart
We're speaking about a new exhibit at Hauser and Wirth called Arshile Gorky, New York City, commemorating 100 years since Gorky moved to New York. The exhibit is on view today through November 2nd at 134 Worcester Street. I'm speaking with Saskia Spender and Cosima Spender, Gorky's granddaughters. We got a really nice text from somebody. It says, a few years ago, I learned about a WPA mural by Gorky that had been discovered by the Pan New Jersey while the preservation of the first airport terminal. A beautiful aviation mural with a fascinating background, it's true.
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Saskia Spender
And in New Jersey, actually, they found Gorky had been commissioned through the Federal Art Project to make some public art and most of it was lost. But in New Jersey, they found these two murals and they exhibited in their museum in Newark. And they're fantastic. They're very flat. There is this sense of, I think that his mural art was slightly different from his own work. His own work is very layered and has these multiple textures, layers that at first are just of lines and colors, but also become literally material layers. And as his practice went on, actually became layers of support. So that we have had paintings on canvas and on paper and more drawn things, all on the same stretcher. So when you were referring to discovering a gawky just a few years ago, not only has the New Jersey had this experience, but also as a family, we had that experience, which is terribly exciting. We were able to see colors that had last been seen by the artist for the first time.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk a little bit about the exhibit. And there are these six drawings in the very beginning. Why do you think he tended to lean towards drawings first? Also drawings of the same thing, they repeat each other, but they're slightly different each time you look at one.
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Cosima Spender
I think he really was following a kind of the traditional way of being an artist, which is really you sketch and you refined your composition and you really get it right on paper. And then he would. From that, he would make the painting in a very quick way, having really internalized the perfected composition that he'd been practicing on paper.
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Alison Stewart
What would you want people to look at, Saskia? Those six drawings, that first thing you see when you walk into the gallery.
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Saskia Spender
Those earliest drawings, you see how he is using lots of different kinds of lines. There's some fine lines and some thin, thicker lines. They've been applied with pen, with paintbrushes. He's used different kinds of lines to give this sense of the different layers of perhaps meaning or anyway of imagery. And the other thing is this recurrence. He was looking for what he called his personal iconography that he drew from the city and then rearranging it in the different spaces of a piece of paper. And I think that why he started on paper is that paper was less expensive than canvas because those colors, you know, this was the Depression. It was really difficult for artists to live. He was prioritizing art materials over eating, and he was very tall and thin and didn't drink and worked day and night. So that was. That was his priority.
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Alison Stewart
We're speaking about Arshil Gorky, New York City. It's at Hauser and Wirth Gallery. After a quick break, we'll talk about the discovered painting. This is all of it. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In studio with me is Saskia Spender, president of the Arshil Gorky foundation and Cosima Spencer. Excuse me, Spender, director and producer of the documentary Without Gorky. We are talking about the new exhibit at Hauserwirth called Arshiel Gorky, New York City, commemorating 100 years since Gorgi moved. Gorky moved to New York. Let's talk about the discovered painting. This is so exciting. Untitled Virginia Summer. We'll get into what that means in a second, but first, the painting was discovered accidentally. Would you share the story, Saskia?
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Saskia Spender
Well, in a sense, we should not have really been surprised because we had already seen this layering of textures. Even the repetition of drawings can be seen as a form of layering. And then in the painting, he would use these washes of color to obscure some parts and recontextualize other parts of the image. And in time, we could see that certain late canvases, particularly from the summer of 47, when he was working incredibly energetically because he had lost a lot of work in a studio fire the year before, and he possibly felt his time was limited because he'd had a very brutal operation and he was terminally ill with cancer. He began to attach different layers of paintings on the same support. And we don't know why it could be connected to this sense of multiplicity of meaning in one layer over the other. But maybe it was just that he ran out of stretches and we could see little bits of color coming through the canvas at the back of this painting on paper. So we knew there was something underneath. But we couldn't possibly imagine that what would come out be such a complete image that we had an indication of from many drawings that he had made. And often there is a painting associated with drawings in Gorky. And in this case, we had all the drawings, but we didn't have the painting. And so when, when the Limit, which is the title of the drawing that was over, it was removed, which it had to be done for conservation reasons. We would never have dared interfere so much with something if we had left it alone for 80 years. And underneath we saw this complete image with all its associated. It was really a wonderful, wonderful moment.
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WNYC Host/Producer
You must have been so excited when you saw that.
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Saskia Spender
Yes, yes, because we felt very connected to Gorky since he was the last person to have seen this work. We knew there might be something also, because when he died, there were these letters from his dealer's lawyer saying, what should we do about those doubles? Should we tell the widow about the doubles? And we know that he was behind on his consignments, which is not unusual. And there it was. We suddenly thought, well, maybe this is what the dealers meant by doubles.
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Alison Stewart
I do want to share with people that the exhibit opens today, but there'll.
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WNYC Host/Producer
Also be a screening of your documentary.
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Alison Stewart
Cozuma Without Gorky at Hausenwirth on 18th Street. That's September 7th at 3pm the documentary.
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WNYC Host/Producer
Tells a story through three different generations. Would you explain to people what the documentary, who's a part of it, what it's about?
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Cosima Spender
Well, the film is titled Without Gorky. And it really is about living without Gorky and living, feeling his presence through the three generations also, because unfortunately, he ended his own life when our mother was five and our aunt was three. And so really the daughters, you know, our mother and our aunt and the. And my grandmother at the time when I made the film, it was really exploring the aftermath of someone disappearing so early on in the girl's life, in the daughter's lives, and yet Having such a huge presence on our family because of his art and because of how important he was to other artists and Abstract Expressionism. It's really not a conventional documentary about an artist with just talking about his biographical life. Also because we know so little about his life before him coming to America and even when he got to America, he was very, very. He didn't. He mythicized his past and he told a lot of stories. Our grandmother didn't even know he was Armenian until after his death. So there was so much mystery and so much pain surrounding his disappearance. Really it's a film about. It's a home movie about our grandfather. And yes, you know, through making it we got to understand more where he used to hang out or how our grandmother met him and what the atmosphere was like and those times, but also the difficulties of those times because he was penniless, they were living in a cramped studio. Our grandmother had two daughters that she had to take out of the studio so that to let him paint. And slowly he became very ill. And also there was a fire in his studio. So very dramatic events, all in the space of that seven year relationship he had with our grandmother, which also coincided with a period of great freedom and of becoming unstuck creatively by going to the countryside and being exposed to nature again in a very kind of immersive way, in a way he hadn't been since his childhood on the shores of Lake Van. So we learned through making the film, we really. I explored this relationship between our mother and our aunt and their mother, which was fraught to say the least, but it was a great experience because we also visited his birthplace on the shores of Lake Van. And really we all felt connected to this birthplace through his art. But none of us in the family had gone there to visit it. And we finally went there. It was so beautiful. And to know that this is what he had witnessed before terrible genocide and that he had had a beautiful childhood before the difficult times and that we could, you know, share the beauty by going there and seeing it and imagining his childhood was very healing for the family.
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Alison Stewart
How much did you know about your grandfather, Saskia?
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Saskia Spender
Very little. And all of it mediated by all these complicated family relations that are quite typical in artists families. When you have a strong personality who communicates in a different way, it's bound to happen.
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Alison Stewart
We got another text here that says, please ask about Gorky's two versions of his portrait of his mother and himself as a young boy. Specifically the significance of his mother's hands.
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Cosima Spender
Well, there's Very little that Gorky ever wrote about his experience in Armenia and his childhood. But there is. I can't remember the poem very well, but he does mention, for instance, you know, the mother died of starvation at the end of the walk away from that village. And it definitely. There is a sense. The colors are one of the versions that the pale. The pale face. And he describes it in this poem as a chalk. A chalk face of the starving, starving people. And I think the hands, because they're not that detailed, that some people have, tend to interpret that as the idea that the mother was really. Was unable to get out of that situation. In fact, she passed away in his arms of starvation. And then he was. He was brought to America by a missionary boat with his sister.
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Saskia Spender
Does that sound right? I think so.
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Cosima Spender
No.
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Saskia Spender
I think that his sister, who was here, sent him money to go under Presidente Wilson. I'm not sure Presidente Wilson was a missionary, but he had been at a missionary school where he'd done carpentry as a young man, as a child in Yerevan.
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Cosima Spender
But it's interesting that he's done two of those portrait, two of the paintings of himself and his mother. And going back to what you were saying about the layering and, you know.
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Saskia Spender
The repetition being a form of layering, almost like meaning. It's hard to ascribe meaning or even to look for meaning. We just have to accept that some things might be inexplicable. And in art, really, the kind of attention that art demands is a different kind of attention from the attention that, say, reading something or interpreting something, where you're trying to find a precise meaning or sign. I think that with art, really what he was inviting was a form of engagement that slows time down. And that is an experience that we have when we go to museums.
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WNYC Host/Producer
Another text is, my grandmother was a.
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Alison Stewart
Student of our steel Gorky's at Grand Central School of Art.
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WNYC Host/Producer
Possible to talk about those years quickly.
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Saskia Spender
Yeah. He often supported himself as a teacher whenever he could. And he did teach at Grand Central Station. We went to look for the place where he taught, and we found this mysterious room on the second floor. It was all closed down for renovations and empty. But it was wonderful to think that he had been there. And his students were incredibly supportive of him throughout his life. They often became collectors and collected his work.
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WNYC Host/Producer
You know, I understand this centennial is part of a group of museums and galleries actually working to celebrate the centennial of coming to New York, tell folks what people might be able to see.
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Saskia Spender
Well, from October 4th, MoMA is going to put out four gawky works from their permanent collection in the top floor outside the elevators. And the Met is also putting out one of its Gorkys called Water of the Flowery Mill. And other museums are doing educational activities and getting involved so people will be able to retrace Gorky's steps and see him.
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WNYC Host/Producer
What piece of art would you like people to spend just a few more seconds in front of from your exhibit?
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Cosima Spender
It's a very personal choice. There's so much. And also what's great about the exhibition is seeing the difference between the 30s and the 40s and seeing this process and the change in his art. So there is definitely something for everyone.
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WNYC Host/Producer
What piece would you like people to spend just a second more in front of?
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Saskia Spender
Well, one of my favorites is Agony, which is charcoal and oil on paper and that he washed in the bathtub to achieve this effect. This incredible. You see the paper disintegrating and pilling and he's used the erasers to make a kind of line. It's really a wonderful work.
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WNYC Host/Producer
I love seeing the pieces with a.
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Alison Stewart
Great, like.
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WNYC Host/Producer
How much depth there is in the painting in each painting. Every time you look at it, it's just like this angle you look at it looks different. You look at it from this angle, it looks different. It's really amazing.
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Saskia Spender
Yeah. And you have so many different sensations whilst you watch it. And I think that that sort of vertigo of not being able to pin down the meaning and just letting the different images wash over you is exactly what he was looking for.
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Alison Stewart
You should check out Hauser and Wirth's exhibition. Arshil Gorky, New York City. My guests have been Saskia Spender and Cosima Spender, Arshil Gorky's grandchildren. So nice for you to come to the studio for us.
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Saskia Spender
Thank you so much.
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Alison Stewart
There's more all of it on the way right after the news.
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Sling TV Advertiser
I'm gonna put you on nephew.
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Saskia Spender
All right, unc.
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Cosima Spender
Welcome to McDonald's.
- [27:02]
Alison Stewart
Can I take your order, miss?
- [27:03]
Sling TV Advertiser
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
- [27:14]
WNYC Host/Producer
NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.