Arshile Gorky's Western Road Trip

“Three artists piled into a Ford station wagon...”

I receive dozens of press releases daily for art exhibitions, museum openings, gallery shows, and cultural events around the world. This tease immediately captured my interest.

Who were the artists?

Where were they going?

When was this?

The answers proved even more delicious than the headline.

In the summer of 1941, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), his soon-to-be wife Agnes ‘Mougouch’ Magruder (1921-2013), and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) packed into Noguchi’s brand-new Ford station wagon and set out for Los Angeles from New York City. Their two-week road trip marked Gorky’s first visit to the American West and his first time away from New York since arriving in this country as an Armenian refugee in 1920.

He hadn’t left the City in 16 years.

They drove through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before arriving in California. The trio spent all of July, August, and September going from Los Angeles to Northern California and exploring the Sierra Nevada Mountains before husband and wife headed back separately to New York through Chicago.

Focused on the transformative impact of this journey on Gorky’s career, “Horizon West” at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood gallery presents a selection of Gorky’s landscapes from before, during, and after the transcontinental trip, tracing the development of his incomparable approach to the genre.

The exhibition features never-before-exhibited works alongside paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show in August 1941 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), offering visitors a rare opportunity to study at close range the evolution of Gorky’s landscapes in response to his first-hand experience of America’s vast scenery.

Arshile Gorky, ‘Untitled (From a High Place II),’ 1946. Oil on canvas. 43.2 x 61 cm  17 x 24 in. Photo Todd White Art Photography

Arshile Gorky Comes to America

Gorky came to America fleeing the Armenian genocide. His mother died of starvation in the old country.

Gorky’s birthplace was the Armenian Highlands, the village of Khorkom on the eastern border of what was then the Ottoman Empire, present-day Türkiye. This is the Caucasus, a mountainous region. When Gorky drove out West, he’d known big mountains from his childhood.

A childhood beset by tragedy.

Beginning in 1908, Ottomans massacred 30,000 Armenians in his family’s homeland. World War I brought more horrors to the Armenians. Forced relocations. Mass rape. Hunger. Cold.

The worst you can imagine.

When Gorky arrived at Ellis Island, still a teenager, with a younger sister, he was met by an Armenian family who took the siblings to the family’s home in Massachusetts. He made his way to Boston for art school. He was a prodigy.

In 1924, Gorky moved to New York for more instruction and a teaching position, barely 20-years-old. One of his students was Mark Rothko.

In New York, he told people he was from Russia and dropped his birth name, Vosdanig Adoian, for one more Russian sounding. He upheld the deception throughout his life. Magruder didn’t find out her husband was Armenian until after his death.

Gorky’s contribution to art history is helping motivate the shift toward abstraction in 20th-century American art. He served as a crucial bridge between the dreamlike imagery of Surrealism and the later development of Abstract Expressionism.

Gorky at the Grand Canyon

Gorky and Magruder’s traveling companion was Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). He would become one of the most influential and celebrated sculptors of the 20^th century. Noguchi was born in Los Angeles and lived with his mother in Japan from age two until 13, before returning to the U.S.

Magruder recounted that when the trio arrived at the Grand Canyon, Gorky and Noguchi turned their backs on the immense vista, declaring it “too big to be interesting.” Yet, at a nearby Hopi reservation, Gorky was enthralled by handmade adobe ovens that reminded him of the clay stoves from his childhood in the Armenian Highlands.

He liked the small of the West, not the big.

Early in his painting career, Gorky painted landscapes in a conventional, Paul Cézanne-derived style. In the 1940s, following the road trip, he turned to a more micro perspective. In 1942 and ’43, as he began spending more time in the countryside – Virginia and Connecticut – he began taking a drawing board into pastures and sketching abstractions looking into the grasses. An insect’s perspective.

Arshile Gorky, ‘Untitled (Butterfly and Leaf),’ ca. 1932–1934. Ink on paper. 35.6 x 43.2 cm  14 x 17 in. Photo Peter Schälchli

“We've considered how this trip was an influence on that turn in his work,” Parker Field, Managing Director of the Gorky Foundation, said. “We found there was a theme here of a more intimate, microscopic view of the landscape, particularly a kind of landscape that has within it a history, a history of the people.”

A landscape holding a history of its people, like the Caucuses.

As the Hauser & Wirth exhibition’s title suggests, Gorky’s travels catalyzed shifting perspectives, both literal and psychological. By bringing the artist’s transcontinental road trip into focus, “Horizon West” offers insight into what compelled Gorky to look toward the micro, the intimate.

Gorky Goes to San Francisco

The Grand Canyon wasn’t the only spectacle of the American West that left Gorky flat.

“We drove up to Big Sur,” Magruder recalled of their trip later in life. “It was all so beautiful, but he wasn’t stunned—he only liked things he could get close to; he liked hills he could walk over.”

The Hauser & Wirth show includes a remarkable documentary of the road trip viewable here with firsthand accounts from Magruder before her passing.

“(Gorky) complained that the High Sierras weren't the right shape,” Field said. “They weren't living up to his idea of a mountain as informed by the mountains of his homeland.”

Forgive the man.

He grew up in the mountains, but not these mountains, and he missed them. His mountains. He longed for the mountains of his homeland that held the joy of family and the trauma of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. He could never, and would never, return.

Not that Gorky didn’t marvel at any of the landscape. He and Magruder stopped in Virginia City, Nevada, after his San Francisco exhibition, and were married there in September 1941. They then honeymooned along the Yuba River in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

“The forest there are big lakes and torrents with clear running water rushing through the stones and rocks, and beside the torrents are enormous cypress trees, as still as sentinels with their heads in the clouds,” Gorky wrote to his sister. “They seem to press upwards against the blue of the sky to stop the bright blue sky from one day falling down.”

The trees Gorky described were most likely ponderosa pine.

How the West Inspired Arshile Gorky

The married Gorky’s returned to New York where his artmaking intensified. Immediately.

A legendary story tells of the night Gorky returned to his New York studio. Waiting for him was a letter from Lloyd Goodrich, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Goodrich wanted a painting for an upcoming show.

“Gorky took one of his old canvases that was covered in paint – maybe had been worked on over the course of the year – caked in layers and layers of dried oil paint, and he, in that first night back, added a new surface to the painting and it was done,” Field said picking up the story. “It was exhibited at the Whitney within those following weeks; allegedly it was still wet when it hung on the wall. There's this incredible sense that upon his return he felt a newfound freedom, and he started making works that were of a new style and technique than he had previously done, where he started adding these final layers of paint on the surface that masked underlying layers.”

Gorky would call these his “Garden in Sochi” series named after the Black Sea resort in Russia that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. Prior to traveling west, Gorky had been working on a series referencing his upbringing in Khorkom. Upon his return, these experiments crystallized into his breakthrough series, which presaged his later celebrated abstract landscapes.

Paintings like Untitled (Mojave) (1941), now in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and on loan to “Horizon West.”

Arshile Gorky, ‘Untitled (Mojave),’ 1941–1942. Oil on canvas. 28 78 x 40 58 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Burt Kleiner. Photo Museum AssociatesLACMA

“It definitely incorporates familiar themes of the desert with its arid palette. It's orange, red, and yellow, in this hostile, arid way,” Field explained of Untitled (Mojave). “The shapes are rendered with a camouflage-like technique. It almost feels as if they're vibrating with that desert heat. It very much appears like a landscape with its horizon line and shadow devices.”

His journey to the West sparked a creative whirlwind that lasted throughout the 1940s.

The road trip influenced his work. His thinking and subject matter changed. So did his lifestyle. He was freed of the city. Gorky spent more and more time in the 1940s in nature. Perhaps a love for open spaces dormant since childhood had been reawakened in the vastness of the American West.

Arshile Gorky’s Influence on Western Landscape Painting

Gorky had intended to work for several weeks during the trip in a country studio set up by one of his friends in San Francisco. The whole thing fell through. He did make drawings and paintings, but only one identified with certainty as having been produced on the trip remains.

“We have a really wonderful ink drawing that's in the exhibition that he made in August 1941 in San Francisco,” Field said. “In July 1941, he wrote his sister from San Francisco saying, ‘Since I have left New York, I have not slept either night or day, and I'm painting everything. Yes, the hills, the moon, the mountains, etc., etc.’”

Gorky wasn’t a Western painter. He was an Armenian New Yorker. For his influence on Western art, a subtlety significant influence, look to Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993).

Gorky’s next solo museum show took place after his death by suicide in 1948. The artist had received a terminal cancer diagnosis, his marriage was falling apart, his studio burned, and he suffered from a bad car wreck. The show was organized in 1951, and it traveled to the same museum in San Francisco that hosted his first solo exhibition.

Diebenkorn flew from New York to see it.

“Richard Diebenkorn is one of the most famous modern/contemporary landscape painters of the West Coast. On the flight to see Gorky’s exhibition in San Francisco is when he had this epiphany about aerial perspective,” Field explains. “It was the first time he’d ever been on a plane, and it completely transformed his career. He started taking aerial photographs and then creating these landscapes from those vantage points.”

Aerial vantagepoint landscapes, a motif popular in Western painting today, an innovation inadvertently owing to Arshile Gorky.