The apprentice who took twenty years to become himself

Arshile Gorky spent most of his painting life openly learning out loud. Born Vosdanig Manoug Adoian around 1904 near Lake Van, in the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, he reached the United States as a young immigrant and remade himself, new name and all, into a New York painter. (He sometimes hinted he was kin to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He was not.) Through the 1930s he painted, frankly and on purpose, throughthe masters he loved: a long Cézanne phase, then a long Picasso phase, then Joan Miró, the Spanish Surrealist whose soft floating shapes Gorky studied like scripture. For two decades he was one of the most gifted apprentices in America, and he knew it, and it bothered him.

Two things have to be set down before the picture, both quietly, because the picture is not a caption to either. The first is a wound. Gorky lived the Armenian genocide, the mass killing and forced expulsion of Ottoman Armenians during the First World War, and in 1919 his mother died of starvation in its aftermath. That loss runs underneath his art for the rest of his life. But it is not a key that unlocks each shape, and the museum that holds this canvas is careful to frame the homeland in it as remembered gardens, not literal autobiography. The loss is named once; the forms stay open.

The second thing is a stretch of happiness, which matters because this is a happy picture. In 1941 Gorky married Agnes Magruder, whom everyone called “Mougouch,” and the couple began spending long stretches on her family’s farm in Virginia. Out in that countryside, drawing plants and dirt and light, Gorky finally stopped painting through other men and started painting through himself. The early-to-mid 1940s were his breakthrough years. The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, made in 1944, sits right in the middle of them.

And he had company that pushed him. The Second World War had driven the leading European Surrealistsinto exile, and a good number of them, including their leader André Breton, were in New York during the war years. (Surrealism is the movement, launched in 1920s Paris, that tried to put the unconscious mind directly into art: dreams, accidents, free association.) Gorky met them. They took him seriously. Breton in particular decided that this Armenian American was a genuine Surrealist discovery, and began to champion him. So in 1944 Gorky stands at a hinge: a fully formed draftsman who has finally found his own voice, encouraged by the very Europeans whose method he was bending to a new purpose.