Arshile Gorky & Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionism
By: Polina Rosewood
Tags: Painting, Artist, History, Art, Creativity

Arshile Gorky & Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionism

The Eastern European creators of American Color Field Painting.

Several shifts in the intellectual, social and political climate of post World War II America gave way to the rise of Abstract Expressionism. The artistic style gained popularity as a weapon against Totalitarianism, which had plagued Europe during the war, and as a method of art-making that championed individuality and self-expression.

Critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg explored the motives and meaning of the contemporary American art scene through scholarly writings and critical reviews of gallery exhibitions. Many of these art critics and scholars deemed Abstract Expressionism a uniquely American art movement; after all, it took root and blossomed almost exclusively in New York City.

Although the profound explorations and developments of the Abstract Expressionists are largely accredited to American-born figures like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, one simply cannot ignore the profound ways in which European immigrants and war refugees shaped the American art world. Fleeing from violence and persecution in their native countries, millions of Europeans arrived to Ellis Island in the 1930s and 1940s. With them, they brought European art theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other intellectual values that greatly influenced the birth of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

The works of Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, two influential artists in the Abstract Expressionist schools of Action Painting and Color Field Painting respectively, exemplify this Euro-American exchange of ideas. Although the formalist approaches of Gorky and Rothko differ greatly, both artists share life stories threaded with tragedy.

Born in Turkish Armenia in 1904, Gorky and his family fell victim to persecution and exile during World War I. One by one, members of Gorky’s family fled to the U.S. but he remained in Armenia for several years with his mother and his sister, Vartoosh. In 1915, the Armenian people were forced on a death march across the Caucasus mountains, during which Gorky’s mother died of starvation in his arms. Gorky and Vartoosh eventually escaped to the United States but Gorky’s traumatizing experiences would always weigh heavily on him.

Rothko faced the very similar threat of persecution in Lithuania. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903, his childhood was plagued by mob violence against Jews in Russia. When he was ten years old, Rothko fled with his mother and sisters to meet his father and brothers in Portland, Oregon, where his father died just seven months later (Findberg, 62–64, 106).

As their artistic endeavors progressed, both Gorky and Rothko channeled their childhood experiences into artwork that was fraught with raw emotion. Gorky’s art was “the vehicle through which he experienced everything,” (62). As educated and self-taught intellectuals, both men were familiar with the principles of surrealism and the European Avant-Garde.

Gorky took an interest in cubism as well, emulating the geometric style in his earlier works. He had a habit of copying the styles of the great modern masters believing that good painting is good painting regardless of originality. However, as his style progressed, his paintings increasingly relied on surrealist automatism.

Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi, № 3, c. 1948. Oil on canvas, 31 x 39in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Garden in Sochi, №3, finished in 1948, qualifies, as Abstract Expressionist in it’s own right. Considered one of his later paintings, Garden of Sochi stylistically mirrors the works of Spanish surrealist Joan Miro but manages to showcases a technique that is recognizably Gorky (68).

The artist weaved curvilinear brushstrokes into shapely masses, distinguishing them from the crème-colored background by filling the carved-out forms with bold splotches of color. Meant to depict an abstracted landscape, Gorky contradicts preconceived illusions to three-dimensional space and applications of earth-tones by painting his landscape on a flat plane marked by outlines and blocks of bold red, yellow, green and black hues.

His objective in depicting the Garden in Sochi in this manner was not to illustrate its physical appearance but to capture the positive emotional associations the artist ties to the place. According to his sister, the painting refers to their own family garden back in Europe: “It was a custom in our family at the birth of a son to plant a poplar tree which would later have the birth date and name carved into it. Gorky as a child loved his tree and took great pride in caring for it,” (68).

Like Gorky, Mark Rothko also believed capturing emotion was essential to the art-making process. He even described the composition of his mature works as the ideal format for “dealing with human emotion [and] with the human drama as much as I can possibly experience it,” (105).

In the early years of his career, Rothko drew influence from surrealism and contemporary psychoanalysis. Post-war artists in New York City art schools studied the psychological and philosophical works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, often attempting thereafter to visually explore these ideologies. Rothko, like many Abstract Expressionists, developed an interested in Jungian archetypes and the concept of the “collective unconscious.” From about 1940–1946, Rothko explored Jungian notions through symbolic and figurative representation.

In the late forties, he began experimenting with more simplistic block forms of color. He sketched new ideas and developed an admiration for the work of Clyfford Still, a color field painter who belittled automatist painters as mere “scribblers,” (109). Rothko eventually met Still in California and drew inspiration from Still’s expressive use of color blocks.

Mark Rothko, Number 22, 1949. Oil on canvas, 9ft 9in x 8ft 11 1/8in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1949, Rothko finalized his new style of color field painting, exemplified in Number 22. The artist himself described this composition as “the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer,” (110). Rothko’s new style contrasts the monumental idea with the simplistic visual, the stable composition with the emotional turmoil it illustrates.

The artist’s fiery color palette recalls Gorky’s Garden in Sochi but conveys a different mood entirely. While Gorky’s painting immortalizes a fond childhood memory, Rothko’s canvas conveys a raw anger that almost assaults the viewer. He was a deeply depressed man whose friends described him as a short-tempered, often irrational person. When discussing his own visual aesthetic, Rothko described his work as possessing “a clear preoccupation with death,” an apparent characteristic of his mature color field works (111).

Although representation was not an aim of Number 22, the distinct yellow lines etched into the central red bar strongly suggest a horizon line. The warm yellow and orange tones of the color clouds could represent sunlight permeating the sky and blanketing the Earth. By this interpretation, it can be argued that Gorky and Rothko arrested the emotional essence of place.

Influenced by early 20th century European art trends and the teachings of European intellectuals, both Gorky and Rothko created visual images that addressed both the grandiose psychoanalytic principles of Carl Jung and the intimate, internal struggles of the individual artist. Placing a foot in the European intellectual world and the New York City art scene, Gorky and Rothko also channeled their shared early childhood traumas and their internal emotional struggles. Ultimately, they created works that achieved transcendence through simplistic forms.