Meir Pichhadze and Arshile Gorky's "American Portraits"

Meir Pichhadze and Arshile Gorky's "American Portraits"

One can find similarities between the works presented in Meir Pichhadze's 2003 show and a group of works by American artist Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). Despite his premature death, Gorky is now considered a forerunner of American abstract expressionism. Our concern here, though, is a body of non-abstract works that Gorky dubbed "American Portraits". Painted during the 1930' and 1940' in New York, that encompasses self-portrait as well as portraits of his closest family members. This group of portraits is differs from the artist's earlier works, and is founded on highly personal sources: a photograph of the artist and his mother, drawings of his sister Vartoosh, and memories from his homeland, Armenia.

In the catalogue of Gorky's 1981 retrospective at the New York Guggenheim, in reference to his "American Portraits", Diane Waldman wrote that Gorky "drew upon his past and feelings to create statements of eloquence and passion."

The most important series in "American Portraits" group is the different versions of "the Artist and his mother, all based on 1912 photograph taken in the city of Van in America. In the photograph, the eight-year-old Arshile is seen standing with a bouquet next to his seated mother. The mother starved to death several years later, 1919 at the age of 39. The photograph was sent to his father who immigrated to America in 1908. Gorky was reunited with his father after 12 years of separation, only upon his arrival in the USA in 1920. Gorky return to his memories-filled photograph on several instances, the first of them in the mid1920'. He first drew several studies that referred to the photograph as a whole or to parts of it. He than painted two versions of oil on canvas. The earlier is now in the collection of Whitny Museum, New York, and the later in the

Collection of the national gallery of art, Washington DC. Despite the marked difference between the two versions, both are clearly permeated with a sense of alienation and sadness, trying Meir Pitchhadze's autobiographical paintings to Gorky's works.

In her concluding words about "American portraits", Waldman notes that they are "related to prototypes in American manuscript illumination as well as to models of western European portraitures. Specific parallels may be drawn between the distinctive almond-shaped eye, the solemnity, dinghy and frontality of many of Gorky's subjects and the figures of Near Eastern manuscript. Hieratic stance and intensity of gaze lend religious overtones to certain portraits. These overtones are enhanced in "the artist and his mother" by the architectural background which recalls the setting of renaissance annunciations. The versions of the "The artist and the mother are at once contemporary portraits, imaginative interpretations of a photograph and original conceptions which refer to lingers and Picasso and resonate with the sense of religious icon". The elements indicated be Waldman in Gorky's portraits are also presented, in their way, in Meir Pichhadze's paintings. Undoubtedly, Meir Pichhadze's portraits in the 2003 exhibition all attest to the artist's affinity to his dear ones and to his childhood memories from Georgia from the point of view of the present. As afore said, all the paintings were executed after photographs: some were taken many years previously and extracted from the family album, others were taken recently, during the artist's visit to Georgia in 1999. The link outlined by Waldman between Gorky's portraits and classical masterpieces of the past and religious icons, may also be found in Meir Pichhdze's works, in his unique mode. Meir Pichhadze's classical world, however, is not anchored in lngres        and Picasso, but rather in Georgia's national painter – Pirosmanshvili.