Everything about Arshile Gorky totally explained
Arshile Gorky (real name -
Vostanik Manoog Adoyan; ), (
April 15,
1904? –
July 21,
1948) was an
Armenian-born
American painter who had a seminal influence on
Abstract Expressionism.
Biography
Gorky was born in the village of
Khorkom near
Van, Turkey. It isn't known exactly when he was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of
Van. Gorky fled Van in
1915 during the
Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in
Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in
1920, aged 16, but they never grew close. At age 31, Gorky married. He changed his name to Arshile Gorky, in the process reinventing his identity (he even told people he was a relative of the Russian writer
Maxim Gorky).
In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the
New School of Design in
Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early
1920s he was influenced by
impressionism, although later in the decade he produced works that were more
postimpressionist. During this time he was living in
New York and was influenced by
Paul Cezanne. In 1927, Gorky met
Ethel Kremer Schwabacher and developed a life lasting friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer.
Notable paintings from this time include
Landscape in the Manner of Cezanne (1927) and
Landscape, Staten Island (1927 - 1928). At the close of the
1920s and into the
1930s he experimented with
cubism, eventually moving to
surrealism.
Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930-1934) is a series of complex works that characterize this phase of his painting. The canvas below
Portrait of Master Bill depicts Gorky's friend,
Willem de Kooning.
In English translations of letters allegedly written by Gorky in Armenian to his sisters he often described moods of melancholy, and expressed loneliness and emptiness, nostalgia for his country, and bitterly and vividly recalled the circumstances of his mother's death. Most of these translations (especially those expressing nationalistic sentiments or imparting specific meanings to his paintings) are now considered to be fakes produced by Karlen Mooradian (a nephew of Gorky) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, the contents of the fake letters heavily influenced the authors of books written about Gorky and his art during the 1970s and 80s.
Gorky's later years were filled with immense pain and heartbreak. His studio barn burned down, he underwent a
colostomy for
cancer, his neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident, and his wife of seven years left him, taking their children with her. Gorky hanged himself in
Sherman, Connecticut, in 1948, at the age of 44. He is buried in North Cemetery in Sherman, Connecticut.
His daughter, the painter Maro Gorky, married Matthew Spender, son of the British writer Sir
Stephen Spender.
Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver is the Cock's Comb," "The Betrothal II," and "One Year the Milkweed" immediately prefigured
Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the
New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the
School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the
National Gallery of Art, the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Metropolitan and the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many worldwide, including the
Tate in London.
Gorky in fiction
As a survivor of the
Armenian Genocide, Gorky is portrayed in
Atom Egoyan's movie
Ararat.
Gorky appears as a character in
Charles L. Mee's play about
Joseph Cornell,
Hotel Cassiopeia.
and is briefly mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Bluebeard".
Stephen Watts's poem 'The Verb "To Be"' (Gramsci&Caruso, Periplum 2003) is dedicated to Gorky's memory.
Further Information
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