The Worst Art Collection in the World

G.I.Gurdjieff

Although it wasn’t his main concern, G.I. Gurdjieff, best known as a spiritual or psychological teacher, was a prolific composer; with the indispensable help of Thomas de Hartmann, he created several hundred pieces for the piano. Because Gurdjieff had little proficiency on the instrument, it was de Hartmann who developed their basic themes and melodies, which were often inspired by folk tunes, and although the compositions are sometimes dismissed as trivial, they are still widely admired. The Gurdjieff Ensemble, for instance, has just released ‘Zartir’, which returns the music to its roots in folk instrumentation, situating it in a tradition of Armenian bards and troubadours, including Ashugh Jivani, Baghdasar Tbir, and the legendary Sayat Nova, who was the subject of the extraordinary film ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’, by Sergei Parajanov.

Listening to the record, I was reminded of how I first came across Gurdjieff and his esoteric ideas in Meetings with Remarkable Men, a book owned by my Scottish grandfather and which later found its way to me. Fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s, Gurdjieff became a favourite countercultural figure in the 1960s, and Peter Brooks’ 1979 film, which I queued to see at the Irish Film Theatre in Earlsfort Terrace, emphasised the commonality between the hippie ethos and the book’s spiritual exoticism. As we waited in line for tickets, followers of Gurdjieff’s teachings distributed leaflets about the film, and mine was later inserted into the book, where it still remains.

In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff tells of his early upbringing and young adulthood at the beginning of the 20th century; he travels from his native Armenia, through Turkey, Russia and Asia in search of spiritual awakening. Much of the account reads like an adventure story; there are disguises, intrigues, hypnotism, magic, near-death experiences, meaningful encounters with a Russian prince and a rescued girl, tales of revolution, and journeys with friends to unknown places. Gurdjieff and his friends come across some scrolls that indicate the existence of an ancient esoteric brotherhood; determined to learn more about them and their secrets, he embarks on a quest that leads him from the Gobi Desert to the Himalayas, where he arrives at a monastery at which devotion, dance, and spiritual knowledge are combined in a mysterious religion. The film, visually beautiful, evokes much of the richness of the fanciful story, but its well-meaning Englishness can be jarring. To see Warren Mitchell - celebrated for his portrayal of the bigoted Alf Garnett in the television comedy series ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ - playing the part of Gurdjieff’s wise father is somewhat disconcerting, albeit not entirely inappropriate.

Although it purports to be a true story, the characters in the book often appear to be more symbolic than realistic; it is full of diverting anecdotes but short on convincing details. Gurdjieff neither says much about the knowledge and wisdom of the bards and dervishes of the Sufi tradition he would doubtless have met on his search, nor does he add anything substantial about them. As much a rogue as a spiritual seeker, Gurdjieff supported himself on the way with various money-making enterprises, some of them shady; in one such venture, featured in the film, he paints birds yellow so they will be taken as canaries; in another, he learns how to make and sell bric-a-brac, ‘all the rubbish with which it was at one time fashionable to decorate tables, chest of drawers, and special what-nots’.

After his ‘awakening’, Gurdjieff invented a teaching method he called ‘The Fourth Way’, which was intended to supersede the three traditional Eastern approaches to spiritual knowledge: the paths of the monk, the fakir, and the yogi. The Fourth Way, often called ‘the Work’, does not remove students from the world or reject its flaws and imperfections, but encourages them to come to terms with it. ‘The Work’ made use of teaching and stories, music and movement, physical labour, self-observation, and communal experience; by all accounts, it was challenging and could be life-changing. One follower later wrote that Gurdjieff ‘was not a magus, nor a thaumaturge, nor a philosopher, nor a mystic as some have claimed. He was something else, at the same time simpler but no less extraordinary. He was a danger. A real threat. A threat for one’s self-calming, a threat for the little regard one had of oneself, a threat for the comfortable repertoire where we generally live. But at the moment when this threat appeared, like a ditch to cross, a threshold to step over, one was helped to cross it by his presence itself. This threat was quickly followed with a sense of well-being. One had set aside the mask; one had sloughed off the weight of one’s images and one felt suddenly free’.

Many have thought that ‘the Work’ was Gurdjieff's attempt to recover ancient spiritual wisdom, which was about to be lost in the West, and to share it in a way that was accessible to contemporary men and women without the mediation of religion or dogma; others have felt that his avowed purpose, which was to raise humanity from the deadening condition of ‘waking sleep’, was less than wholly benign. Gurdjieff set his followers arduous tasks and drew attention to their weaknesses and failures, doing so with insistent and often disturbing rigour. He added to this regime the discipline of dances and movements, one of the aims of which, it was said, was to maintain every limb in a different rhythm. Success in doing so apparently produced an illusion of mastery, but further perseverance revealed that the movements were nonsense. At that point, the student would have attained their leader’s level of illumination.

In his late years, Gurdjieff lived in a Paris apartment, where he received students and guests. Roger Lipsey, in an interesting article, remarks that visitors were often struck by the collection of framed paintings that covered nearly all the walls, in the manner of nineteenth century museums. Why, he goes on, did Gurdjieff possess and display a vast collection of paintings of indifferent quality, ranging in theme from landscape and still life to sacred Christian subjects and the occasional nude or Modernist abstraction? ‘From one perspective’, he writes, ‘the art collection - considered by some connoisseurs to be the worst art collection in the world - was pure philanthropy. Rather than humiliate indigent older people, mostly Russian exiles, by giving them charity outright, he had built a reputation as an art collector always interested to see their own paintings or works in their possession. From a second perspective, which reached me through oral tradition, he considered his art collection to be one part of a domestic diorama illustrating the idiocy and grandeur of the human race; it was a collective symbol. On occasion he improvised about it. J. G. Bennett has written that once in the late evening when few stayed behind ‘he boasted of all the pictures, their amazing age (plus de 4500 ans! for a poor copy of a Dutch painting), the enormous prices he paid - how they were all stolen out of museums which are left only with copies, etc.’

One of the more amusing and astute assessments of Gurdjieff was made by the writer and self-described ‘philosophical entertainer’ Alan Watts, who called him ‘a magnificent old rascal’. His method of teaching, Watts said, was to weed out the students and followers who understood him from the ones who did not. Those who understood him usually left; those who didn’t tended to stick around.

For further exploration:

‘Zartir’: https://ecmrecords.com/product/zartir-the-gurdjieff-ensemble-levon-eskenian/

Gurdjieff piano music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc3pFFxs7FY

The film of ‘Meetings With Remarkable Men’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS6MEr8ofeE

Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment: https://parabola.org/2018/10/27/gurdjieffs-apartment-here-there-are-no-spectators-by-roger-lipsey/

Gurdjieff playing the harmonium in Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ovxSVj938

A good documentary on Gurdjieff, containing many beautiful vintage images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eXZScF26Dc&t=175s

Gurdjieff’s troupe dancing in New York