From poverty, or of a piece with his camouflage,
for he was a very camouflaged man, Arshile Gorky
as long as I knew him wore a patched coat, either
an old tweed jacket with leather elbow pads in sum-
mer or in winter a ragged overcoat much too long
for even his tall and lean frame. Inside his overcoat
he would draw himself up, or lower himself with-
out bending, so when he crouched, perhaps to ex-
amine a canvas, his coat crumpled down like an
accordion as he folded his legs beneath it with the
same muscles used by Caucasian dancers -- although
Gorky was not Caucasian, was in fact Armenian,
and Gorky was not his real name. This is how
camouflaged he was. His dark fierce face and fero-
cious black moustache concealed something soft
and vulnerable and not easily approached even by
his intimates. Strangers he either frightened or
awed. Policemen, he told me proudly, often
stopped him for questioning, "just because I look
so dangerous," he said, but more probably because
he was walking through traffic too absent-mind-
edly. Once in a dramatically illuminated exhibition
in a museum he appeared suddenly conspicuous
beneath one of the spotlights. A woman crossed
herself, then apologized. "For a moment," she said,
"I thought you were Jesus Christ.""Modom," he
said, drawing himself up to his towering tallness,
"I am Arshile Gorky." And this was not arrogance.
This was his devotion to a self-appointed mission.
Art was Religion for Gorky, and in a museum God
was in His Temple and Gorky was His Prophet.

His life may have been unhappy; or he may have
chosen the climate of unhappiness as deliberately
as he chose his own name, Gorky, the "bitter one."

He did not come to my Gallery directly to show
me his own work. In the winter of 1932 he came
urging me to look at the work of a friend of his
named John Graham, and it was Graham who
generously suggested that I also look at a port-
folio of Gorky's own drawings. "My portfolio is
already in your back office," Gorky reluctantly
confessed, and my secretary told me that "that
man is always leaving his portfolio in the back
office. He comes back days later and pretends he
had forgotten it."

"Yes," said Gorky shamelessly, "and I always
expect you will have opened it and discovered
masterpieces. . . ." So I sorted through them now,
and I answered Gorky gently. Because if I had not
found masterpieces, I nevertheless thought I de-
tected future greatness. I went down to Union
Square with Gorky and looked at everything in his
studio. I listened to his passionate discourses con-
cerning the faded illustrations tacked on his walls,
monochrome reproductions of Mantegna and Piero
della Francesca and photographs of Ingres draw-
ings. I listened to the woes of his financial dis-
order, and I lent him five hundred dollars. Later,
when he couldn't repay, I bought some of his
drawings. But I could not promise him an exhibi-
tion.

"Your work is so very much like Picasso's," I
told him. "Not imitating," I said, "but all the same
too Picassoid."

"I was with Cézanne for a long time," said
Gorky, "and now naturally I am with Picasso. . . ."

"Someday, when you are with Gorky . . ." I prom-
ised.

I had never before met a painter with the em-
pathy to enter so completely into the style of an-
other. I thought of the translations Moncrieff had
made from the French of Proust. It was said that
he memorized a dozen pages of Proust at a time,
and then having completely absorbed the text he
translated with no further reference to the orig-
inal. And I remembered a concert given by Harold

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