GARDEN IN SOCHI
ARSHILE GORKY, 1941
Your brain is going to start naming things. Bird. Face. Boot. Maybe a fish. Don't get attached. Nothing stays put. The painting is called Garden in Sochi. Gorky painted it three times. Small problem: he'd never been to Sochi. He wasn't Russian either. He was born Vosdanig Adoian, in an Armenian village called Khorkom. Arshile Gorky was a name he made up in America. He also told people he was related to Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer. He wasn't. And Maxim Gorky wasn't even Maxim Gorky's real name. So everybody's making things up. Gorky means bitter, by the way. That part stuck. When he was a teenager, the Armenian Genocide drove his family out. A few years later his mother died of starvation. He said she died in his arms. He came to America and never saw Khorkom again. So this garden in Sochi is his father's, back home. He just gave it a Russian address. Then MoMA asked what was actually in the painting. Gorky wrote it all down. Old apple trees that had retired from giving fruit. Wild carrots. Porcupines nesting in the shade. A blue rock half buried in the dirt, where village women rubbed their breasts against it to make a wish. A holy tree hung with strips of cloth torn from people's clothes. He called it the Garden of Wish Fulfillment. None of that is Sochi. That's Khorkom. Now look again. That big dark blue thing in the middle? Maybe that's the rock. Those red and yellow bits on the left? Maybe the tree. He never tells you. But once you hear the story, good luck not seeing it. That's why nothing stays put. He's not painting the garden. He's painting what was left of it after twenty-five years in his head. The real place was gone. His mother was gone. There was no trip back. There was only this. So he painted it again. And again. Not because he finally got it right. Because he couldn't leave it alone.