… he has begun to paint with consistent success and largeness only after reconciling himself to the fact that his primary impulse to paint lies in the enjoyment of art itself.
This is from ‘Review of an Exhibition of Arshile Gorky’ (1948) found in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2, edited by John O’Brian (1986):
Art is, of course, a reading experience, but until about eighty years ago it seemed to be unable to register its own proper experience. I mean that part of experience which has to do with the making of art itself. Even now, though we are relatively well accustomed to poems about the making of poetry (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Stevens) and novels about the problems of novel-writing (Gide and Joyce), we still find music (like Schoenberg’s) about composing and pictures about painting (like cubism) rebarbative; and we complain about the over-intellectuality, aridity, abstruseness, lack of humanity, in these works. Only philistines talk about the lack of “humanity” in art — as if anything worthy of being considered a work of art could be un-human; yet when it comes to contemporary painting — and music — a good many otherwise enlightened people do become philistines, alas. And many may even complain about “un-human” abstruseness in connection with Arshile Gorky’s newest paintings now on show at Julien Levy’s.
Arshile Gorky, Soft Night, 1947 [image from WikiArt]What is new about these paintings is the unproblematic voluptuousness with which they celebrate and display the processes of painting for their own sake. With this sensuous richness, which is a refined product of assimilated French tradition, and his own personality as an artist, with all its strengths and weaknesses, Gorky at last arrives at himself and takes his place — awaiting him now for almost twenty years — among the very few contemporary American painters whose work is of more than national importance. Gorky has been for a long time one of the best brush-handlers alive, but he was unable until recently to find enough for his brush to say.
Arshile Gorky, Agony, 1947 [image from WikiArt][line break added to make this easier to read] Now he seems to have found that in celebrating the elements of the art he practices and in proclaiming his mastery over them. Unlike the classical cubists, Mondrian, or even Miró, he does not seek out problems of painting for his matter. Nor does he comment on the spirit of the times, answering its agitation with his own. On the face of it, Gorky is a complete hedonist, deeper in his hedonism than almost any French painter, and he has begun to paint with consistent success and largeness only after reconciling himself to the fact that his primary impulse to paint lies in the enjoyment of art itself. His art is not incisive — and I am afraid many will misunderstand it for this reason — but it is some of the most luscious, elegant, and mellifluous grand-style painting I have seen, and mixes a certain strength with all its softness and grace. If it still lacks fullness of body, it does not lack solidity and coherence. If certain canvases appear loose or thin, others attain real sonority and resonance and become monumental.
Arshile Gorky, Diary of a Secucer, 1945 [image from WikiArt]
The paintings shown above are those praised (along with some criticism) by Greenberg in this or other reviews.
-Julie
Coloring 