the fatalist
by Douglas Messerli
Valerio Bonelli and Cosima Spender (screenwriters),
Cosima Spender (director) Without Gorky / 2011
Cosima Spender’s film Without Gorky is
truly a family affair, but don’t imagine that you’ll encounter in this
fascinating work something similar to a living room projection of what fun it
was to be part of the Gorky tribe. This rather somber film is something closer
to the homemade films of The Friedmans of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the
Friedmans without any of the judicial accusations that accompany the father
and son of that film.
Here the accusations, rather, are muted, almost at times inexplicable,
as Cosima interviews her grandmother, the now famous painter Arshile Gorky’s
wife, Agnes “Mougouch” Magruder, a woman liberated years before such a concept
might even have existed. Rolling her own cigarettes while recounting her
more-than-painful later years with the artist, she, the daughter of Admiral
John Holmes Magruder, Jr., was—as the cliché goes—almost swept off her feet by
the dashing storyteller who, in his early days, Gorky was.
Close friends with artists Roberto Matta, Wilhelm de Kooning, André
Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and many others, Gorky introduced her not only to a
high-powered art world, but, mostly on foot, to the New York City which her soon-to-be
husband loved.
Working
out of a large studio near Union Square, Gorky painted up a storm of portraits
(including the famed works of the artist and his mother) and early abstractions
before the impact of the Abstract Expressionism which later gained him, after
his death, great fame.
Mougouch (an Armenian term of endearment) soon married him, but with the
birth of their first-born daughter, Maro, found life difficult living with a
child—and soon after a second daughter Natasha—in a working artist’s studio. As
Maro explains, “he let me paint on the back of his canvasses, but when, on
occasion, I tried to move to the front, he grew furious.”
Much of their mother’s time was spent in parks and on the busy streets
daily attempting to entertain her children until she might return home to eat
dinner.
Gradually,
the family, through temporary loans by friends of country houses, was able to
split its time between New York and Connecticut, the later far preferable to
Gorky’s wife and children, while lacking for the artist the intensity of the
city and his interchange with his artist friends. Although, he there worked to
free himself, by immersing himself in nature, of his former practice of
sketching and working with smaller paintings before tackling the larger
canvases, thus creating a new excitement of directly applying paint to canvas
without any preconceptions, Gorky found his temporary locations could not
compare with his orderly studio.
Both their mother and her daughters recall the heated arguments between
the couple, along with Gorky’s increasing abuse of alcohol. In 1946, a series
of serious health problems occurred which brought the family into further
crisis.
Gorky’s
studio barn burned down in a fire, taking with it numerous of his most recent
paintings. The artist seemed almost fatalistic about their destruction; as we
later discover, he was doomed by birth to become a kind of fatalist. But soon
after he was forced to immediately undergo a colostomy because of developing
cancer, which further exacerbated the fraught relationships between Mougouch
and him.
For
her part, his wife recognized that he was considering suicide, and whenever she
saw him carrying about a rope, hurried the girls out to greet him and bring him
inside. Nonetheless, things grew even more difficult, in one instance Gorky
“helping,” as his wife puts it, her to tumble down a narrow flight of stairs
from their bedroom.
In the process of filming, Cosima takes her aunts back to the house,
which in Maro’s case brings memories that are simultaneously lovely and
horrific. Nathasha, on the other hand, can recall nothing—except for the
stairs, which ends, for her, in tears, frustrated that she has clearly blocked
nearly all memories from her mind, but also momentarily growing inexplicably
frightened by the image of the staircase.
That
event, in turn, brought a series of even more frightful turns. Terrified by her
husband’s violence, Mougouch returned to New York, spending a weekend of
reassuring love with Matta. When she arrived back in Connecticut, Gorky was
ready both to beat her and possibly kill his artist friend. His sister, with
whom he was in regular communication, insisted “In America we do not beat our
wives,” and after a few rounds in Central Park, Gorky and Matta sat down on a
bench to discuss the situation between them.
Unfortunately, soon thereafter Gorky was involved in an automobile
accident with his gallerist Julien Levy at the wheel. Gorky’s neck was broken
and his painting arm paralyzed.
Soon after, Mougouch took the girls and left Gorky, who committed
suicide by hanging in 1948 at the age of 44, at the very moment when audiences
and critics were finally beginning to notice his great achievements in art.
It
is clear from the tensions in the interviews and conversations that Cosima
films that Maro, now a painter herself, was never quite able to forgive her
mother, particularly since Mougouch sent both her daughters to a strict Swiss
boarding school, while she continued an affair with Matta.
Natasha, in particular, was almost daily
punished for wetting her bed at age 3.
Yet through their conversations in this film, at least Maro begins to
realize just how difficult Gorky was to live with. Moreover, in the years since
the entire family has come to realize that numerous things the artist had told
them about himself—for example, that he was the great-grandson of Maxim Gorky—had
all been lies. As more and more art shows were organized they came to discover
that their father’s real name was Vosdanig Adoian, and that his family lived in
Armenia, forced to take part in the Turkish-led marches away from their
homeland which led to the murder of millions of individuals, including Gorky’s
mother who died of starvation along the long trek.
Late in the film, Maro with her husband sculptor and writer Matthew
Spender (the son of poet Stephen Spender) and Natasha travel to the original
home of the Adoians in Khorgom, Vilayet of Van. In that beautiful landscape
nestled in low-lying hills which catch the afternoon shadows and filled with
flowers and shrubs they recognize what might have a child’s eye-level view of
the world he painted in abstraction again and again throughout his later years.
Exploring a home similar to one in which their father and grandfather might
have lived and witnessing the very splendor of Gorky’s childhood world they
seem to come to some sort of reconciliation, however brief, with the failures
of both their mother and father, now able finally to embrace their lives
without Gorky.
This is not an easy film, for either Gorky’s family nor for the viewer,
but along with the visual presentation of many of his great works, we do gain a
new appreciation for the man who rejected all of his painful past just to come
to the US and be embraced by the new culture. Unfortunately, as they muse, he
did not live long enough to witness that.*
*My husband Howard N. Fox began his curatorial
career at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. working
with Cynthia Jaffee MacCabe on a show of artists who had come to the US with
the same hopes and desires that Gorky had, The Golden Door:
Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976, a show in celebration of the
American Bicentennial, including more that 200 artists. The first thing that
fell out of the catalogue when I opened it up yesterday to explore its wonders
was a black-and-while photograph of Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother from
1926-1929, obviously a reproduction to be used by newspapers and magazines. I
recall that painting from the show along with many others.
Los Angeles, August 27, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment