‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’

Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective is about to open at Tate

Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years. She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now than when we knew her as children; we were mesmerised by her chic, her gravelly voice with its hint of an American accent, her sense of fun and the faint whiff of excitement that enveloped her. When she was about 17, my father, then working in China, helped her ashore from a capsized sailing dinghy and fell in love with her on the spot. She was then Agnes Magruder, daughter of a captain in the American Navy stationed off Shanghai, and her youthful romance with my father evolved into a lifelong friendship.

It was the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky who named her ‘Mougouch’, an Armenian term of endearment, and she has been Mougouch to all and sundry ever since.