Arshile Gorky is tragedy from front to back and obviously the art world loves that.

It starts with fleeing the Armenian genocide and ends 46 years later with a noose in a barn. Sorry, there’s pretty much no joke you can make about that.

But being a walking avatar of bad luck will give you some pretty weird habits. Some people turn to cats, lots start drinking excessively, but Gorky became entirely untrustworthy. Like “does anybody know his real name?” kind of thing. (Vosdanik Adoian, if you were curious.) He alternated between posing as a Georgian prince, a relative of Maxim Gorky (his own pseudonym), a graduate of Brown, a student of Kandinsky, and who knows what else.

If you stick with something long enough people will buy it: his wife for a while, his friends, and the entirety of the abstract expressionism movement which adopted him as the grandfather of action painting. Trouble with that veneration is Gorky was hyper-anal about what he put on his canvases and where. He’s as much of an action painter as Jackson Pollock was sober—not very.

This piece is based on a number of studies he did of a mill in the Housatonic River in Connecticut. He planned his paintings out on gridded paper beforehand which begs the question: what do we do with the penises and vaginal slits and fleshy lumps if we can’t chalk it up to Freudian slips? DID HE MEAN TO PUT ALL THOSE PENISES AND VAGINAS IN THERE?

Actually Gorky is one of the few modernists who isn’t a painterly equivalent to huge, lifted pickup trucks and his yonic tendencies are bio-curious more than pornographic. The line between landscape and human figure is as hard to pin down as who he really was, but that’s what makes it exciting.