Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) was one of the most important American painters of the twentieth century and a pivotal figure in the transition from European Surrealism to American Abstract Expressionism. Born Vostanik Manoug Adoian in Khorgom, in Ottoman Armenia, he survived the Armenian genocide as a child. His mother died of starvation in his arms during the deportations, a trauma that would shape his art and life until his death. He emigrated to the United States in 1920 and eventually adopted the name Arshile Gorky, claiming a spurious cousinship with the Russian writer Maxim Gorky as part of the invented identity that would carry him through his American career.

Gorky studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York and became one of its most respected instructors, and he pursued a rigorous, almost fanatical process of self-education by working through the major European modernists one by one. Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, and Kandinsky each occupied him in turn, and his early work openly absorbed their vocabularies as he searched for his own visual language. That mature language finally emerged in the early 1940s, when Gorky's friendship with the exiled European Surrealists in New York, particularly André Breton and Roberto Matta, catalyzed his invention of a distinctive biomorphic abstraction rooted in the natural forms of the Virginia and Connecticut countrysides where he spent his summers.

The final years of Gorky's life brought devastating setbacks: a studio fire destroyed much of his recent work, he was diagnosed with cancer, a car accident broke his neck and injured his painting arm, and his wife left him. He took his own life in 1948. His paintings are held in every major museum, and he is remembered as one of the founding figures of Abstract Expressionism.