Gorky, Arshile

Gorky, Arshile ( Vosdanig Manoog Adoian) (1904–1948). Armenian-born American painter, one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism. During the First World War his father emigrated to the USA to avoid conscription into the Turkish army and his mother died a victim of Turkish persecution of the Armenians. Gorky managed to escape with his sister, and they found their way to America, settling first at Providence, Rhode Island. In his new country he adopted the pseudonym Arshile Gorky, the first name being derived from the Greek hero Achilles, the second (Russian for ‘the bitter one') from the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, to whom he sometimes liked to claim he was related (evidently not realizing that the writer's name also was a pseudonym). In 1925 he moved to New York, where he first studied and then taught (1926–31) at the Grand Central School of Art. Gorky took a romantic view of his vocation and is said to have hired a Hungarian violinist to play during his classes to encourage his students to put emotion in their work. His early paintings were strongly influenced by Cézanne (whom he considered ‘the greatest artist that has lived') and he also fell under the spell of Picasso, as can be seen both in the haunting The Artist and his Mother (Whitney Museum, New York, c. 1926–9), based on a photograph taken when he was a child, and in his experimentation with Cubism at this period. Much of his work of the 1930s represents an attempt to synthesize the flatness of Cubist structure (in which he was influenced also by Stuart Davis) with the improvisatory fluidity and energy of Surrealist automatism.

From 1935 to 1939 Gorky worked for the Federal Art Project, his paintings under its auspices including an abstract mural for Newark Airport, New Jersey. In the early 1940s he came into contact with the circle of European Surrealists who had emigrated to New York to escape the Second World War and under their influence (particularly that of Matta and Miró) he created the distinctive style of his last phase, featuring ‘a mass of delicately drawn, visceral shapes floating in a tangible world of brilliant transparent color. The shapes are suggestive of internal organs, brutally mutilated, or microscopic views of plants and flowers transformed into strange menacing beasts or embracing in an ecstasy of sexual fulfilment. They are at the same time living organisms, still-lifes, or landscapes, all filled with an ecstatic and disturbing sense of physical vitality and psychological conflict’ ( H. H. Arnason in Britannica Encyclopedia of American Art, 1973). However, just as Gorky began to emerge as a powerful original voice in American art, he suffered a tragic series of misfortunes. In 1946 a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed a large proportion of his recent work, and in the same year he was operated on for cancer. In 1948 he broke his neck in an automobile accident, and when his wife left him soon afterwards he hanged himself, leaving a message chalked nearby reading ‘Goodbye My Loveds'.

Gorky has been called both the last of the great Surrealists and the first of the Abstract Expressionists, and his work in the 1940s was a potent factor in the emergence of a specifically American school of abstract art: Adolph Gottlieb wrote that he recognized ‘the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism. Out of these opposites something new could emerge, and Gorky's work is part of the evidence that this is true.’ Willem de Kooning in particular was a close friend and was greatly influenced by him.