ART CHRONICLE
513
I now find Gorky a better painter than Ryder, Eakins, Homer, Cole,
Allston, Whistler, or any other American one can mention.
This writer once made the mistake of thinking Gorky a slave to
influences-first Picasso's and Miro's, then Kandinsky's and Matta's.
These influences were indeed there, but the error was in seeing them as
something
obeyed
rather than assimilated and transformed. His second
one-man show, at Julien Levy's, made me begin to change my mind, and
a third show at the same dealer's made me change it definitely. But
nothing has convinced me so flatly of my error and demonstrated its
shocking extent so fully as this last show at Kootz's. I had seen all the
pictures before, but during the two years since when I had last seen
most of them they seemed to have blossomed into some added richness
that made irrelevant whatever in them had at first appeared derivative.
They struck me as being much more unified now and as possessing a
singular excellence compounded of skill and feeling that owed its
inspiration to no one.
Many of us who followed Gorky's course with real interest had al–
ways appreciated his enormous gift but, for all our interest, we had
failed in large measure to recognize the extent to which he fulfiJIed it
in the last four years of his life. And I have reason now to believe that
the fulfilment dates back much further than this, as we would have
known had we had the eyes to see. We have had to catch up with Gorky
and learn taste from him; he was one of those artists who had by
themselves to form and extend our sensibility before they could be
sufficiently appreciated. And we now see that he did do this. How
otherwise can the suddenness be explained with which he is now
revealed to us? Revealed in all the abundance and perfection of the
fruits he garnered from his supernal skill as a draughtsman and his taste
and sincerity as a colorist. In such pictures as the "Diary of a Seducer"
(1945), "Landscape Table" (1945), and "The Beginning" (1947) he
shows himself as one of the great painters of his time and among the
very greatest of his generation. This, of course, makes his absence all
the more tragic. By now Gorky would have been only forty-five, and he
should have been here to receive his due.
(Iement Greenberg
