Paul Levy
Mougouch Fielding (*) was born Agnes Magruder in Boston, Massachusetts in
1921. The name “Mougouch,” an Armenian term of endearment (“little
mighty one”), was bestowed by her first husband, the great
Armenian-American abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky
(1904-1948).
Her father, John Holmes Magruder II, an American naval
attaché from an East Coast establishment family, took his Bostonian wife
Esther Hosmer, a society beauty, and their family around Europe and
Asia on his various postings. Agnes was at school in Washington, The
Hague and Switzerland. In Shanghai she became interested in the
Communist movement and left, taking a ship across the Pacific, ending up
in Iowa City, hoping to be taught by Grant Wood (the painter of
American Gothic).
Wood, as Mougouch later said, “wasn’t
there.” (Hannah Rothschild said: “When, aged 16, Mougouch was caught
with a sailor in flagrante delicto, she was packed off to America in
disgrace with $100 and a suitcase full of ballgowns.”) She went to New
York and worked as a typist on the communist magazine China Today.
Willem and Elaine de Kooning invited her to a party to meet Gorky in
1941, but neglected to introduce them; leaving, Mougouch was surprised
to be joined at the door “by the silent man I’d been sitting beside,”
who mispronounced her name but invited her to a café.
Gorky
“was tall and had marvellous dark eyes – there was something fatherly
and familiar about him,” Mougouch said in a 2010 interview with her
granddaughter, Cosima Spender (who made a film in 2011, Without Gorky,
and whose other grandfather was Stephen Spender). He had recreated
himself variously as a Georgian prince, nephew of the celebrated Russian
writer Maxim Gorky, a former undergraduate at Brown College, and a
student of Kandinsky. She later discovered that he was born Vosdanig
Manoug Adoian in the village of Khorgum on the shores of Lake Van, then
in the Ottoman Empire. In 1915 he witnessed the Armenian genocide,
saying that his mother had died of starvation in his arms, and fled to
America, settling in New York.
Mougouch and Gorky had an
exciting life together, which included driving to San Francisco with
Isamu Noguchi via the Grand Canyon, Santa Fe, Los Angeles and Big Sur,
“but Gorky,” she said, “was deeply unhappy in San Francisco and wanted
to go home.” On the way back they were married in Virginia City, Nevada.
They
had their first daughter, Maro, in 1943, and went to stay in a farmhouse
in Virginia belonging to Mougouch’s mother. Their second daughter,
Natasha, was born in 1945, the year Gorky was taken on by the important
New York dealer, Julien Levy. Mougouch’s social contacts had given him
access to a new circle of collectors; the couple’s friends included
Léger, Mondrian, Miró and several Surrealist artists, Roberto Matta
Echaurren, Yves Tanguy and André Masson.
Her
granddaughter Cosima said, “Mougouch was too afraid to challenge his
lies: she wanted to believe him. But once they had children, the
pressures of being a young mother desperate to keep the children quiet
so that her volatile and increasingly violent husband could paint,
became too much.”
According to her stepdaughter, Hayden
Herrera. writing in 2009, Gorky’s concentration on his work damaged his
family life. Mougouch told her: “More and more our marriage was just
about my engagement with Gorky’s painting. But I loved him.” Depressed,
Gorky talked about suicide, and she left him in mid-June 1948 and spent
two days with Matta. Gorky, though, soon learned of the affair.
In
January 1946 Gorky’s studio in Sherman, Connecticut had burned down and
he lost a good deal of work. He was also in pain from a car crash, with
a neck injury and damage to his right arm that made him despair of
painting again; then he learned he had cancer of the colon and needed
surgery. He became violent, tore up drawings Matta had given them and
Mougouch fell down the stairs. Gorky’s doctor said he was dangerous, and
that Mougouch should leave and take the children. On 21 July Gorky
hanged himself in Sherman, aged 44, chalking a note on the box he’d
kicked away – “Goodbye my loveds.”
Mougouch was
supported by Matta, but Marcel Duchamp advised her “that the
responsibility of a wife and two children would be too much for Matta,”
and Matta returned to Chile.
She met and married another
painter, John (“Jack”) C. Phillips, from a prominent Boston family, in
Paris in 1949. This, said her stepdaughter, “was a marriage of equals –
she was not in my father’s thrall. She kept the myth of Gorky alive and
shepherded his legacy, finding dealers to handle his work and
encouraging museums to show and buy it.”
She and Phillips
had two daughters, Antonia and Susannah Phillips. In a Director’s
Statement for her 2011 film, Cosima Spender said, “It is no coincidence
my mother, Maro, and my grandmother, Mougouch, live in separate
countries. My mother is still angry with my grandmother for having an
affair just before my grandfather killed himself and then sending her
and my aunt away to boarding school.”
Mougouch was
remorseful about sending the girls to the Swiss boarding school, saying
in the film that it was the only thing she “really regrets.”
However,
says her stepdaughter, “restless always, she left my father after 10
years.” She moved to London, where I met her in the 1970s with her
friend Frances Partridge. In her diaries Frances writes of Mougouch’s
hospitality (she was an excellent cook), and calls her “the best
‘hostess’ I know.” Her guests included some of the remaining Bloomsbury
characters, such as David “Bunny” Garnett and Duncan Grant. When her
daughter Antonia married Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens said she had
sprung from “pure bohemian aristocracy.”
In 1978 Mougouch
married the travel writer Xan Fielding; they lived in the Serriana de
Ronda, looking across Andalusian ilex-woods to the Atlas, then in Paris
on the rue de Rivoli, while he was dying of cancer. Her stepdaughter
wrote: “I remember ... following Mougouch down the Paris street and
trying to imitate her proud, sensuous, and graceful stride. I did not
love her any less after she was no longer my stepmother. I have learned
from her how to cook, decorate a house, dress, talk, walk, and look at
paintings.”
"The Independent," August 4, 2013
(*) Agnes Magruder, painter: born Boston 1 June 1921; married 1941
Arshile Gorky (died 1948; two daughters), 1949 Jack Phillips (divorced
1959; two daughters), 1978 Xan Fielding (died 1991); died London 2 June
2013.
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