SFMOMA, Part 35: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Enigmatic Combat (Arshile Gorky, 1936–37).
"Enigmatic, even to curators," SFMOMA's audio guide admits. Enigmatic Combat, 1936–37 — roughly 35¾ by 48 inches of oil on canvas, a gift of Jeanne Reynal in 1941 — is Gorky in transition, and it shows. Cubist-derived forms collide across the canvas: flat, jazzy, brightly colored shapes that almost cohere into figures, objects, landscapes — and then refuse. It's a puzzle the artist was still solving. A few years later, after Matta's automatism arrived, Gorky would break through into the biomorphic fields of his mature masterpieces. This is the before.
The forms have been read as birds, fish, sailboat sails. There's a black rectangle like a pit or doorway, edges like shattered glass. The audio guide's suggestion: the painting "may draw from Gorky's childhood memories" of Armenia — a past that was already, by 1936, an erasure. For decades it was reproduced upside-down or flopped, a fact that tells you everything about how the market and the museums handled work they couldn't read. If you can't hang it right, you haven't looked.
The name
Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanig Manoug Adoian in 1904, in a village in the Ottoman Empire — in the historical Armenia that would become the site of the Armenian genocide of 1915. His mother died of starvation in his arms in 1919. He fled, reached Boston in 1920, and at twenty-one invented himself: Arshile Gorky. Both names are fictions. Arshile — from Achilles, the beautiful warrior. Gorky — from Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer. Whose birth name was also not Gorky. A pseudonym stacked on a pseudonym: the signature itself is a small autobiography of displacement.
The combat
The title says combat; the canvas says uncertainty. Painted 1936–37, it belongs to the years when Gorky was working through Picasso and Miró, digesting cubism, painting under the WPA, watching the Europeans arrive in New York. The "enigmatic" part isn't a pose — it's the honest record of an artist in the middle of becoming someone. Gorky's line, reported from the studio: "I never finish a painting — I just stop working on it for a while." Enigmatic Combat is a painting he stopped on, and the stopping is visible — forms still arguing with each other, the combat unresolved.
He was the bridge. Every history of abstract expressionism passes through Gorky: the Armenian who absorbed Picasso, taught de Kooning how to draw, absorbed Matta's automatism, and died in 1948 — suicide, at forty-four — just as the movement he fathered broke through without him. The last eighteen months: a studio fire, a cancer diagnosis, a car crash that left his painting arm impaired, his wife leaving with their children. The painting's enigma is gentler than the life's, but it's the same man: someone building a self out of paint, one layer over the place where the old self burned.
So here's the thesis: Enigmatic Combat is Gorky mid-invention — the 1936–37 canvas where cubism hasn't yet dissolved into the biomorphic, where a man who renamed himself twice is still deciding what the new name's painting looks like. "I never finish a painting — I just stop working on it for a while." He stopped on this one with the combat still enigmatic, the forms still fighting, the birds and fish and sails still half-emerged from the field. Two years of looking at Picasso, one invented name, zero certainty — and the canvas keeps all of it. 🌁
Timeline — Arshile Gorky
1904 — born April 15, Khorkom, Ottoman Empire, as Vosdanig Adoian
1915–19 — survives the Armenian genocide; mother dies of starvation in 1919
1920 — reaches Boston; invents the name Arshile Gorky
1936–37 — paints Enigmatic Combat
1941 — Jeanne Reynal gifts it to SFMOMA
1944–48 — mature biomorphic breakthrough; then fire, cancer, crash, separation
1948 — dies by suicide July 21, Sherman, Connecticut, age 44