MARO GORKY A LIFE PAINTING

Cressida Connolly on Maro Gorky

There are several reasons to unfurl the banners in celebration of this show of Maro Gorky’s work. It couldn’t be more timely, coinciding as it does with a significant birthday, itself an opportunity to stand back and take in the glorious view of her lifetime in painting. Felicitous too, in that the tide of interest in women artists (the prefix ‘neglected’ hardly needs to be stated) is presently very high. Gorky does not consider herself a feminist, but simply as an artist. That said, she acknowledges:

“There’s a feeling that women aren’t going to stay the course, so no-one pays them any attention until they’re old.”

Museum curators the world over are scurrying to unearth artist Miss Havishams in cobwebby studios or find lost works in small provincial museums. In 2023, shows at the Royal Academy, Tates Britain and Modern, the Whitechapel and Serpentine Galleries are all displaying exciting and important work by women artists of various vintage, nationality, background and culture. As an artist who has lived all her adult life in Europe, Maro Gorky certainly deserves to take her place among them. Any room would sing, with one of her pictures on its walls.

Her paintings chime, also, with a renewed interest in and appreciation of beauty and the figurative. “Beauty is very important. You have to develop your own alphabet of beauty”, she says. Even the bright, vivid colours she uses are now very much in demand, as the long years of sludgy beige and subtle sage greens give way to an appetite for brilliance and zing. Amethyst and ruby, peridot and lapis lazuli, citrine and turquoise: it would come as no surprise to discover that Maro Gorky has been creating her own pigments for many years from some inexhaustible and fabulous collection of jewels.

Any artist must of course draw upon their treasure, and Maro Gorky’s storehouse is great. Her commitment and seriousness, as well as her considerable formal skill, are deftly employed in the service of paintings of tremendous immediacy, freshness and verve. “I believe very strongly in composition, in the four edges of the canvas”, she says. “I remember talking about this with Craigie Aitchison, who had also studied at the Slade. He felt strongly about composition too.” Like all the best pictures, hers are not well served by reproduction: only by standing in front of these paintings does their force and startling vitality become evident.

It is usual to say that an artist is rather like other artists, so that a new viewer will know what to expect. The claim could be made that Maro Gorky’s work has echoes of the early landscapes of Joan Miro, or of the mediterranean terrain painted by Jean Hugo (like Gorky, the scion of an artistic dynasty: in his case, that begun by Les Miserables author Victor Hugo; in hers, being the elder daughter of the world-renowned artist Arshile Gorky. “He wanted me to be a painter. When I was three I had a real easel, real paint, everything”, she recalls of her father, who died when she was five years old). Gorky has a compendious knowledge of art and mentions Yves Tanguy and Kandinsky. Perhaps the greatest influence on her practice - if not her style - has been William Morris, whose way of making art in all his everyday activities has been paramount in the life she and her husband, the sculptor and writer Matthew Spender, have created in the Italian countryside. “It’s a simple life”, she shrugs. “We made most of the contents of the house ourselves. I could be painting or cooking or weeding the garden - it’s all one.”

But it would be reductive to compare her to anyone else, because Maro Gorky has developed a style which - like her palette

- is entirely her own. “A painting is the emotion the artist has while looking at the object”, she says and that emotion is, of course, uniquely the artist’s. She adds:“Pascal said that man must learn to live alone in an empty room”, which is as good a description as any of her own practice. Painting is: “A parallel world, a place where you can have all sorts of adventures, like Alice in Wonderland. For me, painting is a magical country you enter into.”

As a result, her landscapes are as beguiling and full of character as portraits; while her portraits have the formal grandeur of landscape. In each case, the work invites you in. It’s an effect she is aware of: “Looking at the coloured etchings of Hercules Seghers years ago made me realise there’s a path in every landscape that you can walk through and enter another dimension.”

In person Maro Gorky is disarmingly frank and slightly fierce, like one of the clever young people in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen. “I’m not really very good with other people”, she says; but I think that she is just someone who does not dissemble. This makes her as stimulating to be with as her pictures are to look at. Sigmund Freud said that our happiness in adult life depends upon the realisation of childhood desires. In which case, Maro Gorky is entirely justified when she says: “I have done exactly what I wanted to do when I was five years old. Live in the country, make art, be happy. I look back on myself as an infant in Connecticut and I think: I’ve done it.”