Where Surrealism turns into Abstract Expressionism

Before this canvas, two strands of modern painting sat in separate rooms. On one side was Surrealism, with its automatism and its soft biomorphic dream imagery: Miró, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Matta. It had the free hand and the organic shape, but it stayed largely European, often small in scale, and often illustrative, a depicted dream, a scene from the unconscious. On the other side was American abstraction, which before the war was mostly geometric, derived from Cubism (the Picasso-and-Braque method of breaking objects into faceted planes), or else it was plain regionalist realism. Gorky himself had spent the 1930s as a magnificent apprentice inside all of this, painting openly through Cézanne, Picasso and Miró in turn. The pieces existed. Nobody had fused them.

Gorky put them together. He kept Surrealism’s automatism (the free unconscious hand) and its biomorphic form (the soft organic shape), but he scaled them up to mural-size, all-over abstraction with no fixed scene, and he carried his draftsman’s line drawing directly into the painting, thin contours laid over washed, bled, stained color. The result is abstraction fed by the unconscious and by personal memory rather than by Cubist geometry. That particular hybrid, organic form plus automatism plus scale plus drawing-into-paint plus the unconscious-and-memory as the actual subject, is one of the seeds of the movement that would shortly be called Abstract Expressionism.

The painter who put all this in motion had a champion to name it, and the cleanest words about Gorky’s method are Breton’s. In March 1945 André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, wrote the introduction to Gorky’s first solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, and described what Gorky was doing this way:

“Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life …”

That is Breton, in his introduction to Gorky’s 1945 Julien Levy show, and it is almost a description of how The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb works. A cryptogramis a coded message, something written so that only a holder of the key can read it. Breton’s claim is that Gorky carries the key, his own “anterior impressions,” the gardens and bodies and losses already inside him, and uses it to turn nature into a private code on the canvas: not a picture of the world but a decoding of it into the rhythm of life itself. That is the memory-into-form move the painting makes.

Two things from the record. First, the bridge is a synthesis, not a sole cause. Gorky is a decisive hinge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, the shorthand “last of the Surrealists and first of the Abstract Expressionists” is useful, but he did not single-handedly invent the movement, and he never fully swallowed Surrealist doctrine: he kept its automatism and its forms while rejecting its dream-illustration and its pure-unconscious dogma, bending the method toward his own memory-and-nature abstraction. Second, the very titleyou have been reading is Breton’s, not Gorky’s. The Surrealists liked to hand works poetic, deliberately strange names, and Breton supplied this one. “Liver” carries old associations with the soul and the seat of life; “cock’s comb” is at once a flower, a rooster’s crest, and a jester’s cap, with a crude pun underneath. They are layered allusions, not a key. The title is not a label for particular shapes; it is a spell cast over the picture from outside it.

What came after is the proof. The younger New York painters took exactly these moves. Willem de Kooning built his biomorphic abstraction out of them; Jackson Pollock ran with the all-over automatist field, the large unhierarchical canvas of pure feeling with no fixed scene; Mark Rothko and the rest of the emerging New York School moved the same way, toward abstraction made of feeling rather than of geometry. The standard line, that Gorky is where Surrealism becomes Abstract Expressionism, is true if you scope it as influence and synthesis rather than as a one-man invention. This canvas is one of the doors that the whole next movement walked through.