GARDEN IN SOCHI
ARSHILE GORKY, 1941
Your brain is going to try to sort these. Don't help it. The second you decide — okay, that's a bird, that's a face, that's a body — the thing starts slipping. One form turns into another. Nothing stays put for long. That's the whole painting. These forms keep sliding into each other. Leaf becomes limb. Limb becomes wound. Wound becomes touch. And that's not Gorky being difficult. That's him being precise about what he's actually painting. Because this is memory. Not clean memory. Not reliable memory. The garden was near Lake Van, in what is now eastern Turkey, where Gorky grew up. Then history tears through his life. The Armenian Genocide. His mother dies in a refugee camp in 1919. He's fifteen. And the garden is gone. Not gone in the casual way. Gone in the deeper way. Gone into him. So when he paints this in 1941, more than twenty years later, what comes out is not a picture of a place. It's what a place feels like after memory has been carrying it that long. He reinvented himself in America. New name. New origin story. New mythology. He took "Gorky" from the Russian writer. It means "bitter." Which tells you something. Lied about his age, his birthplace, who he'd studied with. He said Kandinsky. Not literally. But he studied him so closely, so obsessively, that in his mind it was the same thing. All that invention around his own life. And then he keeps painting this garden. The one thing he didn't invent. There was a tree there, he said. A Holy Tree. Women would press their backs to the bark and tie strips of cloth to the branches as offerings. No one organized it. It just kept accumulating — touch after touch, return after return — until the tree was covered in something that didn't have a name. Look at these forms now. That's what's in here. Devotion and grief and sensation and memory, layered over each other until you can't pull them apart. He painted this garden again and again. Not because he solved it. Because he couldn't.