ABSTRACT

In order to fully censure Freud's abjection of the female and the concepts of perversion it enfranchises, I turn to an early, famous piece of 20th-century abject art, Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother (Figure 5.2). With reference to Kristeva's concept of the abject I read Armenian-American Expressionist Gorky's art as a rebuke of Freudian Oedipal constructions of the mother, that posit her as a primary abject of the social and cultural orders. Gorky's later, abstract dreamscapes have provoked consideration of him as a painter of the unconscious, and The Artist remains a striking representation of mother-son relations, which interpreters have lent decided Freudian significance.