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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's gallery season in New York, with openings happening almost every night, so we're going to look at a few of the many. Gina Beavers will be here on Friday. Wangari Mathenge will be here tomorrow. Today we start with an anniversary exhibit. 100 years ago this fall, a young refugee and aspiring artist decided to change his name and move to New York. The artist who chose the name Arshile Gorky would go on to be one of the most influential abstract expressionists of his time, even when his life was tragically cut short.

A new Hauser & Wirth exhibit celebrates the centennial of Gorky's New York move by presenting several works from different periods of his life, including a painting only discovered recently that was hidden behind another work on paper. Arshile Gorky's New York City is on view starting today at 134 Wooster Street through November 2nd. With me now are two sisters and granddaughters of Gorky. Saskia Spender, president of the Arshile Gorky Foundation. Nice to see you, Saskia.

Saskia Spender: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Cosima Spender, director, producer, and writer of the documentary Without Gorky. Nice to see you.

Cosima Spender: Nice to be here.

Alison Stewart: We also want to let people know there will be a special screening of the film at Hauser & Wirth on September 7th at 3:00 PM. We're so happy to have you at WNYC. This exhibit was inspired by the 100th anniversary of Arshile Gorky moving to New York in 1924. It was also the time he changed his name. Saskia, what was the context of his life that inspired him to come to New York and to change his name?

Saskia Spender: Gorky first got here as a child refugee, as you mentioned, in 1919 and spent four years in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he had some relatives, a half-sister in the community. He actually found it difficult to be an artist in his family's context. They were not artistic people. They had had a lot of experiences of life. They'd seen the best and the worst of humanity. He went to Boston first. Very soon he felt that he really needed to divest himself of his patrilineage and his family and really be his own person so he came to New York City, because which better place to start your life as an artist? It was open to people from all over the world.

Alison Stewart: When he was in New York, he established a studio at 36 Union Square East. What was the energy and the environment of his studio surrounding Union Square during this time, Cosima?

Cosima Spender: His studios, he had one in Washington Square and then one in Union Square. It's where he really processed everything, everything he was learning from the city, the city's museums, like the Met, where he went. He was really self-taught. He looked at Uccello, Grünewald, Cézanne, Seurat, and Picasso. The studios were very beautiful. He was obsessed with cleanliness. It was a very aesthetic studio, very simple, very open space with just a table and a large easel. There are very few photos of the studio, but a lot of artists came in and out of the studio. There was a vibrant community of immigrants. He hung out with John Graham, Stuart Davis, de Kooning, and Rothko, and they all would meet around the city in Quick + Dirty and the museums. It was a very, very vibrant community despite the '30s being so hard. The artists were very active politically. Also involved in the WPA federal works, which saw a lot of construction. New York was this very exciting city, very vertical city, with a lot of construction taking place.

Alison Stewart: Saskia, as Cosima mentioned, he was self-taught. What indication do we have as to why he wanted to be an artist?

Saskia Spender: Well, his family says he always was an artist and had been drawing in the sand on the shores of the Lake Van where he grew up. In the city, he saw art everywhere, on the sidewalks, on the textures of paint, on the peeling signs. Really, his way of seeing was an artist's way of seeing. Then whilst he was here, although he already knew how to draw, he really developed his personal iconography. He chose certain images that he found in the museums and in the galleries that spoke to him and that created his family of artists, his own chosen lineage of artists. He really chose people from all eras and all parts of the world and even all different mediums, because for him, this was really a way of mastering the line and the hand and really learning to express his experience in a very personal way.

In fact, the exhibition that we're having, now that I see it all up, and I see these 17 works up, I see that the first half is really about the mastery of the line, and then the second half is really his emancipation from the line. It's really interesting to see how even his themes change over time, but some of them recur throughout. This is very typical of Gorky, that his idea of being an artist was a very personal thing. He tried to get involved with more collective movements, whether political or artistic or even familial or ethnic. For a while, you could see that his impulse was to join the communities but his ultimate thing is such an individual thing of a person alone in the city, where he was able to be free and do what he wanted to do.

Alison Stewart: Cosima, to your point, though, New York had so much art around it, so many museums, so many galleries that he could go to. What spaces did he like to visit? Who were some of the artists that he liked to study?

Cosima Spender: He spent a lot of time in the Met. In fact, when our grandmother met him and recounted these stories to us, she would talk about his obsession with going to the Met, where he could see Coptic art, he could see the Fayum portraits, he could see all sorts of art on his doorstep. That's where he learned. He learned really by copying. Then, after that, he became his own person and the works became more fluid and more personal, really, in the '40s. In the '30s, it was very much more influenced by the city itself and the lines that he saw in the city. Then once he met our grandmother and he had more chances to escape the city and go to the countryside, he then reconnected with nature.

He had been to Central Park, obviously, and had drawn nature even here in New York. Then he would come back from those trips to the countryside, to his studios in New York, and that's when he did his canvases, after all the preparatory drawings which had been done in [unintelligible 00:07:55] in the countryside.

Alison Stewart: Saskia, who do you see in his work?

Saskia Spender: I see everyone. I see the past and I see the future. There was something incredibly contemporary about his rejection of originality and teaching himself from all eras, but also from art magazines of the time. There are references from the Renaissance, from Japanese prints, from tapestries. This is a very contemporary approach, both the fact that he was self-taught and that he was so eclectic in finding his antecedents through history. One of the cool things we've done for this exhibition is a map of the places that he frequented and the galleries that were opening at that time-

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow, that's great.

Saskia Spender: -so you can see that the art world was beginning to establish itself midtown, around 53rd street, whilst he gravitated with his fellow artists around Union Square. We're doing a digital version of this where you can see the city change, as well as all the artists who live in New York at that time.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about a new exhibit at Hauser & Wirth called Arshile Gorky: New York City, commemorating 100 years since Gorky moved to New York. The exhibit is on view today through November 2nd at 134 Wooster Street. I'm speaking with Saskia Spender and Cosima Spender, Gorky's granddaughters. We got a really nice text from somebody that says, "A few years ago, I learned about a WPA mural by Gorky that had been discovered by [unintelligible 00:09:40], New Jersey while the preservation of the first airport terminal, a beautiful aviation mural with a fascinating background."

Cosima Spender: It's true, in New Jersey, actually, they found-- Gorky had been commissioned through the federal art project to make some public art and most of it was lost. In New Jersey, they found these two murals, and they're exhibited in their museum in New York. They're fantastic. They're very flat. I think that his mural art was slightly different from his own work. His own work is very layered and has these multiple textures, layers that at first are just of lines and colors, but also become literally material layers. As his practice went on, actually became layers of support. We have had paintings on canvas and on paper and more drawn things, all on the same stretcher.

When you are referring to discovering a Gorky just a few years ago, not only has New Jersey had this experience, but also as a family, we had that experience, which was terribly exciting. We were able to see colors that had last been seen by the artist for the first time.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk a little bit about the exhibit. There are these six drawings in the very beginning. Why do you think he tended to lean towards drawings first? Also drawings of the same thing. They repeat each other, but they're slightly different each time you look at one.

Cosima Spender: I think he really was following a kind of the traditional way of being an artist, which is really, you sketch and you refine your composition, and you really get it right on paper. Then, from that, he would make the painting in a very quick way. Having really internalized the perfected composition that he'd been practicing on paper.

Alison Stewart: What would you want people to look at, Saskia, those six drawings, that first thing you see when you walk into the gallery?

Saskia Spender: Those earliest drawings, you see how he is using lots of different kinds of lines. There are some fine lines and some thicker lines that have been applied with pen, with paintbrushes. He's used different kinds of lines to give this sense of the different layers and of perhaps meaning, or anyway, of imagery. The other thing is this recurrence. He was looking for what he called this personal iconography that he drew from the city and then rearranged it in the different spaces of a piece of paper. I think that is why he started on paper. Paper was less expensive than canvas because those colors, this was a depression, it was really difficult for artists to live. He was prioritizing art materials over eating. He was very tall and thin, didn't drink, and worked day and night. That was his priority.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking about Arshile Gorky: New York City. It's at Hauser & Wirth Gallery. After a quick break, we'll talk about the discovered painting. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the studio with me is Saskia Spender, president of the Arshile Gorky Foundation, and Cosima Spender, director and producer of the documentary Without Gorky. We are talking about the new exhibit at Hauser & Wirth called Arshile Gorky: New York City, commemorating 100 years since Gorky moved to New York.

Let's talk about the discovered painting. This is so exciting. Untitled Virginia Summer. We'll get into what that means in a second, but first, the painting was discovered accidentally. Would you share the story, Saskia?

Saskia Spender: Well, in a sense, we should not have really been surprised, because we had already seen this layering of textures. Even the repetition of drawings can be seen as a form of layering. Then in the painting, he would use these washes of color to obscure some parts and recontextualize other parts of the image. In time, we could see that certain late canvases, particularly from the summer of '47, when he was working incredibly energetically because he had lost a lot of work in a studio fire the year before and he possibly felt his time was limited because he'd had a very brutal operation and he was terminally ill with cancer, he began to attach different layers of paintings on the same support. We don't know why.

It could be connected to this sense of multiplicity of meaning in one layer over the other, but maybe it was just that he ran out of stretches. We could see little bits of color coming through the canvas at the back of this painting on paper, so we knew there was something underneath but we couldn't possibly imagine what would come out to be such a complete image that we had an indication of from many drawings that he had made.

Often there is a painting associated with drawings in Gorky. In this case, we had all the drawings, but we didn't have the painting. When The Limit, which is the title of the drawing, that was over it, was removed, which had to be done for conservation reasons. We would never have dared interfere so much with something. We had left it alone for 80 years. Underneath, we saw this complete image with all its associated works. It was really a wonderful, wonderful moment.

Alison Stewart: You must have been so excited when you saw that.

Saskia Spender: Yes. Yes, because we felt very connected to Gorky since he was the last person to have seen this work. We knew there might be something also because when he died, there were these letters from his dealer's lawyer saying, "What shall we do about those doubles? Shall we tell the widow about the doubles?" We know that he was behind on his consignments, which is not unusual. There it was. We suddenly thought, "Well, maybe this is what the dealers meant by doubles."

Alison Stewart: I do want to share with people that the exhibit opens today, but there will also be a screening of your documentary, Cosimo, Without Gorky at Hauser & Wirth on 18th Street. That's September 7th at 3:00 PM. The documentary tells the story through three different generations. Would you explain to people the documentary, who's a part of it, what it's about?

Cosima Spender: Well, the film is titled Without Gorky, and it really is about living without Gorky and feeling his presence through the three generations. Also, unfortunately, he ended his own life when our mother was five and our aunt was three. Really, the daughters; our mother and our aunt, and my grandmother at the time when I made the film, it was really exploring the aftermath of someone disappearing so early on in the daughters' lives, and yet having such a huge presence on our family because of his art and because of how important he was to other artists and abstract expressionism.

It's really not a conventional documentary about an artist just talking about his biographical life. Also, because we know so little about his life before his coming to America. Even when he got to America, he mythicized his past and he told a lot of stories. Our grandmother didn't even know he was Armenian until after his death. There was so much mystery and so much pain surrounding his disappearance.

Really, it's a home movie about our grandfather. Through making it, we got to understand more about where he used to hang out, how our grandmother met him, and what the atmosphere was like in those times. Also, the difficulties of those times, because he was penniless, they were living in a cramped studio. Our grandmother had two daughters that she had to take out of the studio to let him paint. Slowly he became very ill. Also, there was a fire in his studio. Very dramatic events, all in the space of that seven-year relationship he had with our grandmother, which also coincided with a period of great freedom and of becoming unstuck creatively by going to the countryside and being exposed to nature again in a very immersive way, in a way he hadn't been since his childhood on the shores of Lake Van.

Through making the film, really, I explored this relationship between our mother and our aunt and their mother, which was fraught, to say the least. It was a great experience because we also visited his birthplace on the shores of Lake Van. Really, we all felt connected to this birthplace through his art but none of us in the family had gone there to visit it. We finally went there. It was so beautiful. To know that this is what he had witnessed before the terrible genocide, that he had had a beautiful childhood before the difficult times, and that we could share the beauty by going there and seeing it and imagining his childhood was very healing for the family.

Alison Stewart: How much did you know about your grandfather, Saskia?

Saskia Spender: Very little, and all of it is mediated by all these complicated family relations that are quite typical in artists' families when you have a strong personality who communicates in a different way, it's bound to happen.

Alison Stewart: We got another text here that says, "Please ask about Gorky's two versions of his portrait of his mother and himself as a young boy. Specifically, the significance of his mother's hands."

Cosmia Spender: Well, there's very little that Gorky ever wrote about his experience in Armenia and his childhood. I can't remember the poem very well, but he does mention, for instance, the mother died of starvation at the end of the walk away from their village. Definitely, there is a sense the colors are one of the versions, the pale face. And he describes it in this poem as a chalk, a chalk face of the starving people. I think the hands, because they're not that detailed, some people tend to interpret that as the idea that the mother was unable to get out of that situation. In fact, she passed away in his arms of starvation. Then he was brought to America by a missionary boat with his sister.

Saskia Spender: Does that sound right?

Cosima Spender: I think so. No?

Saskia Spender: I think that his sister, who was here, sent him money to go on the Presidente Wilson, I'm not sure Presidente Wilson was a missionary, but he had been at a missionary school where he'd done carpentry as a young man and as a child and Yerevan.

Cosima Spender: It's interesting that he's done two of those paintings of himself and his mother. Going back to what you were saying about the layering and--

Saskia Spender: The repetition being a form of layering, almost like meaning. It's hard to ascribe meaning or even to look for meaning. We just have to accept that some things might be inexplicable. In art, really, the kind of attention that art demands is a different kind of attention from the attention that, say, reading something or interpreting something, where you're trying to find a precise meaning or sign. I think that with art, really what he was inviting was a form of engagement that slows time down, and that is an experience that we have when we go to museums.

Alison Stewart: Another text is, "My grandmother was a student of Arshile Gorky's at Grand Central School of Art.

Saskia Spender: How wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Possible to talk about those years quickly?"

Saskia Spender: Yes. He often supported himself as a teacher whenever he could, and he did teach at Grand Central Station. We went to look for the place where he taught, and we found this mysterious room on the second floor. It was all closed down for renovations and empty, but it was wonderful to think that he had been there. His students were incredibly supportive of him throughout his life. They often became collectors and collected his work.

Alison Stewart: I understand this centennial is part of a group of museums and galleries actually working to celebrate the centennial of coming to New York.

Saskia Spender: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell folks what people might be able to see.

Saskia Spender: Well, from October 4th, MoMA is going to put out four Gorky works from their permanent collection on the top floor outside the elevators. The Met is also putting out one of its Gorkey's, called Water of the Flowery Mill. Other museums are doing educational activities and getting involved so people will be able to retrace Gorkey's steps and see him.

Alison Stewart: What piece of art would you like people to spend just a few more seconds in front of from your exhibit?

Cosima Spender: It's a very personal choice. There's so much. Also what's great about the exhibition is seeing the difference between the '30s and the '40s and seeing this process and the change in his art. There is definitely something for everyone.

Alison Stewart: What piece would you like people to spend just a second more in front of?

Saskia Spender: Well, one of my favorites is Agony, which is charcoal and oil on paper, and that he washed on the bathtub to achieve this effect, this incredible-- You see the paper disintegrating and pilling. He's used the erasers to make a kind of line. It's really a wonderful work.

Cosima Spender: I love seeing the pieces with the great-- how much depth there is in each painting. Anytime you look at it, it's just like this angle you look at, it looks different. You look at it from this angle, it looks different. It's really amazing.

Saskia Spender: Yes. You have so many different sensations whilst you watch it. I think that that sort of vertigo of not being able to pin down the meaning and just letting the different images wash over you is exactly what he was looking for.

Alison Stewart: You should check out Hauser & Wirth's exhibition. Arshile Gorky: New York City. My guests have been Saskia Spender and Cosima Spender, Arshile Gorky's grandchildren. So nice for you to come to the studio for us.

Cosima Spender: Thank you so much.

Saskia Spender: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way, right after the news.

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