“I wish I’d done a bit more
painting and a little less
housework”, says Maro
Gorky as she surveys
her career retrospective,
currently on show at London’s
Saatchi Gallery.
The 20 large canvases are
about evenly divided between
portraits and landscapes, all of
them distinctive for their bold
use of colour and line, dancing in
happily decorative fashion across
the painted boards. The earliest
is dated 1980 and the most recent
– so recent, in fact, that the paint
is barely dry – are a pair titled
Autumn Vines and Spring Vines
(2025): vibrating distillations of
colour and form inspired by the
Tuscan landscape that, along
with family and friends, has been
her most constant subject.
At 82, Gorky is well placed to
assess the shape of her career,
which over the past 45 years has
included a string of international
exhibitions and inclusion in important
collections such as those
of Jacob Rothschild, Bernardo
Bertolucci and Gilbert de Botton.
Since her 80th birthday she
has come to greater prominence,
with public and private collections
looking to acquire her work
– which is finding recognition
among a new generation of curators.
Now, her life and work is
being celebrated not just in this
The artist
hitting her
stride at 82
Despite earlier years taken up
by domestic work, Maro Gorky’s
creative vision has been bold
and constant. Florence Hallett
sees a retrospective of a
painter finally getting
recognition – and still
finding joy in life and art
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VISUAL ARTS 43 FRIDAY
18 APRIL 2025
selection of oil paintings, but in
a companion exhibition of works
on paper at Long & Ryle Gallery,
a stone’s throw from Tate Britain.
Looking back, Gorky might justifiably
be struck by the constancy
of her vision over the decades,
through which she has weathered
the major, antithetical movements
of minimalism and conceptual art.
Today, the “thread of colour” of
the exhibition’s title remains as
persistent and rapturous as ever
– even while Gorky’s expression
grows bolder, her shapes simple
and emphatic.
Though wry in part, her remark
about housework will strike
a chord with many women, for
whom child-rearing and associated
domestic duties present
an obstacle to creative life. For
Gorky, the birth of her two daughters
in the 1970s necessitated a
hiatus of at least a decade when,
she has said, “my paintings were
few, distant and floral”, her artistic
talents diverted into making
clothes and toys for her children.
She was always an artist,
though: born in New York in 1943,
Gorky’s earliest memories are of
spirals of wood falling from a pencil
sharpener, and hearts and diamonds
and clover shapes cut from
coloured paper. These are echoed
now in the springing curls and
ample forms of rampant nature
presented in the Vines paintings.
The eldest daughter of the Armenian-
American painter Arshile
Gorky (c.1904-1948), Maro says in
a film made for the exhibition by
her daughter, Cosima Spender,
that “I decided to be a painter
early on to please my father”.
Arshile Gorky’s early biography
is somewhat hazy, but he arrived
in the United States in 1920
as a refugee from the Armenian
genocide. By the time of his premature
death, by suicide, he was
one of the most influential figures
on the New York scene and a
mentor to Willem de Kooning and
Mark Rothko.
Despite the early loss of her
father when she was five, his influence
was evidently immense,
not least as “a great painter who
did a lot of housework”. While
her mother, the American Agnes
Magruder, came from a naval family
too grand to care much about
chores, her father’s origins as
an Armenian peasant made him
“anal about cleanliness”, says
Gorky inside the gallery.
“He used to scrub his studio
floor before painting. Everything
was spotlessly clean, scrubbed
and scrubbed. It didn’t do him any
good, because he killed himself –
but he had a very clean floor.”
Maro Gorky’s paintings – which,
like the woman herself, are direct
and to the point – are a record of
how she has felt and seen things,
and make clear her continued joy
in life and work. The pleasure of a
sweeping line, continuing until the
brush runs dry, is one we can experience
with her – most easily in
smaller works, such as the curving
leaf blade in Autumn Flowerbed
(2013). Spring (2014), with
its extravagantly luscious colour
combinations, captures the fleeting
intensity of blossom and green
shoots in sunshine.
She achieves something similar,
if melancholy, in the earliest painting
of the exhibition: a double
portrait of her friend Emanuela
Stucchi with her boyfriend – “a
complete cad” who left her by fax
soon after the portrait was painted.
Evocatively titled The Last Act
(1980), the painting is disarmingly
clairvoyant: Emanuela gazes into
the distance, dreaming of a future
life never to be, and on her wrist
a snake bracelet points directly
to “the cad”. He looks directly
at us in an unwelcome moment
of complicity – only Emanuela
remains ignorant of what is about
to happen.
Perhaps it is her ability to see
and preserve moments that allows
Gorky to be sanguine about
the passage of time. Though she
can no longer paint for eight hours
at a stretch, she seems remarkably
untroubled by age, continuing
to paint every day, and on a
large scale.
“We don’t know what happens
after we die – it’s probably the big
exam,” she says. “Maybe we disintegrate,
and become molecules
again. Who knows – I don’t believe
energy is lost. It’s pretty exciting,
if you can avoid too much pain.”
After her father’s death in
1948, the family moved to Europe.
Gorky went to schools in
France, America, Italy and Spain,
and eventually to the French
Lycée in London.
She met her husband, the
sculptor Matthew Spender, when
they were teenagers; he is the son
of the late poet Stephen Spender,
and their parents mixed in the
same bohemian circles. Their
shared experience of this strange
and gilded world bound them
together. “We understood each
other,” says Gorky.
She went to the Slade School
of Art for five years, graduating
in 1965. Spender was allowed to
hang around and take occasional
classes: though never officially a
student, he was still taken more
seriously than Gorky by her tutor,
Thomas Monnington – an “old
fuddy duddy” who asked her why
she bothered painting when she
could become a nurse instead.
“They were such male chauvinist
pigs in those days,” she says.
The exception was the figurative
painter Frank Auerbach, her
teacher for two or three years
and by far the best she had. To
begin with, she tried to paint like
him, imitating his characteristic
accretions of paint until he told
her to stop, encouraging her to
pursue her natural affinity with
colour. Gorky’s work might have
reminded Auerbach of his own
teacher, the pioneering modernist
David Bomberg, whose mastery of
colour as form peaked in his late
portraits and landscapes.
Though Gorky has travelled
widely, the Tuscan landscape is
her central, recurring subject,
painted from every window of the
farmhouse she has shared with
Spender since 1968. It is tempting
to think that the shifts she
charts are those of nature cycling
through the seasons, but Gorky
points out that the landscape
has changed considerably since
she and her husband arrived. It
underwent a brutal transformation
as terraced smallholdings
were bulldozed to make vast
industrial vineyards.
Instead of lamenting the lost
past, she chooses to see these
changes as the latest shift in a
landscape shaped by farmers
over hundreds, even thousands,
of years. Traces of the Etruscans,
the ancient civilisation indigenous
to central Italy – especially Tuscany,
parts of Umbria and Lazio
– between the 9th and 1st centuries
BC, surface in her paintings
as much as in the landscape itself.
Her “map” of the ancient spa town
Saturnia is a curious fusion across
time, as cultivated fields radiate
like flower petals around the extinct
volcano.
In portraits of her pregnant
daughters, vigorous lines and
powerful animation evocative of
Etruscan art give the women a
primal connection to the landscape,
but also, crucially, to Gorky
herself. As the daughter of a
painter, with a mother who loved
the company of artists, there were
plenty of interesting visitors to
the family home, and her friends,
relations and acquaintances
make a catalogue of 20th-century
bohemia. One of Gorky’s favourites
was Francis Bacon (“He was
adorable”), who said she looked
2,000 years old, her dark eyes and
strong features reminding him of
“a Minoan fresco”.
There’s a peacefulness that
comes from this sense of history
as a steady backdrop to the
small scale of daily life, which for
Gorky begins afresh each day.
“We always tidy up before going
to bed: dishes, art, clean table,
everything – then it’s a fresh start
in the morning.”
