Hands

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, c. 1926–36, Oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art.

A lot has happened since I last updated! Naomi Telushkin, one of my lifelong best friends from NYC visited, we went to Rome, (details to follow,) old interns left and new interns arrived, my roommates and I hosted the first full blown Peggy Guggenheim Collection intern house party of 2010, and I got a terrible infection in the ring finger of my right hand.

One of my closest PGC friends, Giulia Thoedoli had her lovely stepfather, Sandro, take a look at my extremely inflamed finger when we were in Rome. Thankfully Sandro advised me to go to the pharmacy to seek immediate care, because his advice probably saved my finger from amputation, (okay maybe that’s extreme)… Regardless, after a week of constantly applying topical antibiotics to my hands, my finger is now almost fully healed.

As you can imagine, I have spent a lot of time over the past week or two caring for, and analyzing, my fingers, and I came to the conclusion that hands are extremely important not only for the obvious reason that they make us capable of nearly everything we do, but also for their sentimental attributes. Hands are evocative of emotions and memories, and they are telling of certain characteristics such as age, gender, and career. I know exactly what the hands of each person I am close to look like, even the hands of people I love but haven’t seen in years, like my grandpa who passed away more than 27 months ago. Grandpa Julie bit his nails extremely low and always had rough cuticles as a product of that habit. He had large, thick, strong, man-hands. He was a gardener. He was a great tickler and always won our thumb-wars.

One Pre-Abstract Expressionist artist I admire, Arshile Gorky created a painting titled The Artist and His Mother (1926-36). The painting is about memories, loss, and a search for home, themes that are prevalent in many of Gorky’s works, as when Gorky was young, his family was exiled from Armenia and sought refuge in the U.S., where his mother died of starvation in his arms. The Artist and His Mother specifically serves to capture Gorky’s longing for his mother. The emotional nature of the subject matter caused Gorky to take nearly ten years to complete this painting.

The composition of the work is based on a photo of Gorky, as a child, standing beside his mother. To me, the most interesting aspect of the work is the fact that despite having spent a decade on the creation of this painting, the hands of the artist’s mother are merely white circles. There are two popular interpretations regarding this detail: 1) Gorky used a loose, painterly style that was conducive to leaving parts of the work unfinished because his memories of his mother and her tragic death were patchy. 2) Gorky’s mother’s hands are meant to appear covered / wrapped up, (as apposed to incomplete,) to highlight her absence by alluding to her inability to touch.

However, I believe that Gorky left his mother’s hands unfinished because it was too painful for him to recreate this extremely nostalgic part of her body. He missed holding her hands, he missed watching her use her hands to create, his missed his mother’s loving material touch, he missed having a mother… After all, there is no image more clear or easily accessible to a child than his mother’s hands.