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Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
	Gorky in 1936
Born	Vosdanig Adoian; April 15, 1904 (self-declared)[1]; Khorkom, Van Vilayet, Turkish Armenia, Ottoman Empire
Died	July 21, 1948 (aged 44); Sherman, Connecticut, U.S.
Resting place	North Cemetery, Sherman, Connecticut
Nationality	Armenian-American
Notable work	The Artist and His Mother

Arshile Gorky (/ˌɑːrʃiːl ˈɡɔːrkiː/); born Vosdanig Adoian (classical Armenian: Ոստանիկ Ատոյեան) was an Armenian-American painter.

Early life

Career

Personal life

Legacy

In popular culture

Gorky is depicted in the 2002 film Ararat, directed by Atom Egoyan about the Armenian Genocide.^[1]

sources

born Vosdanig Adoian in Khorkom Vari Haiyotz Dzor, a village on Lake Van in Turkish Armenia^[2]

the third of four children and the only son of Sedrag Adoian and Sushanig Adoian. His father, a wheat trader and carpenter, fled Turkish military service in 1908, abandoned his family, and, eventually, immigrated to the United States. His mother was descended from a long line of distinguished priests in the Gregorian Apostolic church. When Gorky was four the family moved to Aykestan, a suburb of the city of Van. Gorky did not speak before the age of five, when a tutor successfully alarmed him into protest by convincingly threatening to jump off a cliff.^[2]

During the World War I massacres of Armenians by Turks, Gorky's mother moved the family to Russian Transcaucasia where they settled in Erivan in 1914. Gorky attended secondary school while working at such trades as typesetting, bookbinding, carpentering and comb-making. For a short time, living in Tiflis, he studied engineering and received his first formal art education. His mother died in 1918, and in 1920 he and his younger sister immigrated to the United States. First settling in Massachusetts, he lived with his older sister and worked at Hood Rubber Company. His father was living in Providence, R.I., and Gorky attended various schools in Boston and in Providence: the Providence Technical High School, where he prepared for Brown University's school of engineering, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the New School of Design in Boston, where he became an instructor in 1924. He conducted his own apprenticeship, however, learning more from galleries and books than from classes.^[2]

In 1925 he changed his name to Gorky ("the bitter one" in Russian) and moved to Greenwich Village, New York City. He both studied and taught at the Grand Central School of Art until 1931. Productive friendships with other painters formed during this period--Stuart Davis, John Graham, and, later, Willem de Kooning. In his painting he had almost passed through what Julian Levy aptly characterized as his "arduous years of self-imposed apprenticeship," years in which he successfully identified himself so intently with the work of the impressionists, the postimpressionists, the cubists, and the nonfigurative painters of the 1930's that he seemed almost to paint in their style rather than to create his own. Yet William Seitz, in the perspective of time, has estimated that "derivative though these works are, they stand on their own." Gorky's portraiture, which covered the period from 1926 to 1936, has also gained in stature and may well be his most original contribution. The Artist and His Mother in the Whitney Museum of Art, for which Gorky worked on studies throughout the entire ten years, has become one of the enduring images of twentieth-century American art.^[2]

Gorky's fourth decade, which brought a coalescence of styles, was marked by increasing recognition, exhibitions, and commissions. His first one-man show took place at the Mellon Galleries in Philadelphia, in 1934; his first one-man show in New York, at the Boyer Galleries in 1938. In 1941 the San Francisco Museum of Art presented a retrospective exhibition of twenty of his paintings. Meanwhile he had executed mural commissions for the WPA Federal Art Project, beginning in 1935; for the Aviation Building at the New York World's Fair in 1939; and for Ben Marden's Riviera nightclub in Fort Lee, N.J. in 1941. In 1937 the Whitney Museum of Modern Art purchased his still life in abstract forms, Painting, 1936-1937. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art acquired Garden in Sochi (1941), a biomorphic abstraction in which, according to Seitz, Gorky finally assimilated the influences of Picasso and Miro and transformed them into something of his own. Gorky's first marriage, to Marny George in 1935, ended in divorce the same year; on Sept. 15, 1941, he married Agnes Magruder in Virginia City, Nev. They had two children, Maro and Natasha.^[2]

In the 1940's Gorky's work took on a new and more open form. From 1942 on, he achieved his finest drawings and major canvases, painted in transparent washes and in lines as fine as his pencil drawings. Their content showed the almost microscopic study of nature, which followed upon his visits to the Virginia farm of his wife's parents, and a new surrealist imagery, resulting from his meeting with André Breton and other surrealist artists in 1944. Kandinsky's work was particularly appealing to him at this time and led Gorky to the improvisational aspects of his last work, which was impressive for its freedom and complexity. The various versions and preparatory sketches for the following works, mostly in private collections, illustrated this culminating phrase: Summation (1946), The Plough and the Song (1946-1947), and Dark Green Painting (1946-1948).^[2]

After 1945, Gorky's work was shown annually at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. Levy saw Gorky as "a very camouflaged man" for whom "art was religion." As long as they had known each other, Gorky "wore a patched coat . . . in winter a ragged overcoat much too long." Gorky was tall and lean, his face dark, even fierce, with a "ferocious black moustache," which concealed a softer, not easily approachable quality. (Levy in Seitz, p. 7) Gorky's last years were troubled by the loss by fire of twenty-seven paintings and about 300 drawings in his Connecticut studio in January 1946, by an operation in February 1946 to remove cancer, by an automobile accident in June 1948 in which his neck was broken and his painting arm was injured, and by feelings that he had been thrice rejected--"in his love, in his health, and in his art" (Levy, in Seitz, p. 9). He committed suicide by hanging himself in Sherman, Conn., in 1948. Gorky's legacy of painting explored "psychological space" and laid much of the groundwork for abstract expressionism, which in the decade following his death became America's significant contribution to world art. In 1962 Gorky was accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Venice Bienniale; his work has received growing interest from painters and critics.^[2]

http://arshilegorkyfoundation.org/

"Gorky, Arshile". National Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 6 February 2014.

In the seven or so years before he took his life in 1948, he produced some of the greatest, most explosive works of the 20th century, a synthesis of Surrealism and abstraction that unlocked voluptuous new possibilities for painting and opened the way to Abstract Expressionism. It wasn't a long life, but it was lit by fire.^[3]