Arshile Gorky

Gorky's experience as a survivor of the Armenian genocide had a crucial influence on his work.

• Name — Arshile Gorky • Native Name — Արշիլ Գորկի • Birth Name — Vostanik Manoug Adoian • Born — 15 April 1904 • Birthplace — Khorgom, Vilayet of Van, Ottoman Empire (formerly Armenia) • Died — 21 July 1948 • Place of death — Sherman, Connecticut, U.S. • Known for — Painting, drawing • Movement — Abstract Expressionism • Notable Works — * Landscape in the Manner of Cézanne (1927) • Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930–1934)

Vostanik Adoian was born in the village of Khorgom, situated on the shores of Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey). His birthdate is often cited as April 15, 1904, but the year might have been 1902 or 1903. Toward the end of his life, he was particularly vague about his date of birth, changing it from year to year. In 1908, his father emigrated to the United States to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van. In 1915, Gorky fled Van amidst the Armenian genocide and escaped with his mother and three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, his mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Arriving in America in 1920, at the age of 16, Gorky was reunited with his father, but they never grew close. He settled in Providence, Rhode Island. • Illustration — Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother (c. 1926–1936), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. In the process of reinventing his identity, he changed his name to "Arshile Gorky", declaring to be a Georgian noble (taking the Georgian name Arshile/Archil), and even telling people that he was a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky.

• Illustration — Arshile Gorky's Portrait of Master Bill, 1929–1936. Oil on canvas. In 1923, Gorky enrolled in the recently founded New England School of Art 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 Post-Impressionism. During this time he was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cézanne. In 1925, he was asked by Edmund Greacen of the Grand Central Art Galleries to teach at the Grand Central School of Art; Gorky accepted and remained with them until 1931. His notable students included Revington Arthur. In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Schwabacher, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer. Gorky said: The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview. In 1931, Gorky sent a group of works ranging in price from $100 to $450 to the Downtown Gallery in New York. The artist's name was spelled "Archele Gorki" in the gallery's records; most of Gorky's works from this period were unsigned. The exact nature of their relationship is unknown. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller) purchased from the gallery a Cézannesque still life by Gorky titled Fruit. Gorky may have been introduced to the gallery owner by Stuart Davis, who regularly exhibited there. In 1935, Gorky became one of the first artists employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. This later came to include such artists as Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera and Mark Rothko. In 1935, Gorky signed a three-year contract with the Guild Art Gallery (37 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York). Co-owned by Anna Walinska and Margaret Lefranc, but funded and directed by Lefranc, the gallery organized the artist's first solo exhibition in New York, Abstract Drawings by Arshile Gorky. Notable paintings from this time include Landscape in the Manner of Cézanne (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. The painting illustrated above, The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926–1936), is a memorable, moving and innovative portrait. His The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a childhood photograph taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother. Gorky made two versions; the other is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting has been likened to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness, to Egyptian funerary art for pose, to Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color. Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930–1934) are the series of complex works that characterize this phase of his painting. The canvas Portrait of Master Bill appears to depict Gorky's friend, Willem de Kooning. De Kooning said: "I met a lot of artists – but then I met Gorky... He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends. It was nice to be foreigners meeting in some new place." However recent publications contradict the claim that the painting is of de Kooning but is actually a portrait of a Swedish carpenter Gorky called "Master Bill", who did some work for him in exchange for Gorky giving him art lessons. • Illustration — Arshile Gorky working on Activities on the field, one of the panels for his mural Aviation at Newark Airport, for the Federal Art Project, 1936 When Gorky showed his new work to André Breton in the 1940s, after seeing the new paintings and in particular The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, Breton declared the painting to be "one of the most important paintings made in America" and Gorky a Surrealist. The painting was shown in the Surrealists' final show at the Galérie Maeght in Paris in 1947. Michael Auping, a curator at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, saw in the work a "taut sexual drama" combined with nostalgic allusions to Gorky's Armenian past. The work in 1944 shows his emergence in the 1940s from the influence of Cézanne and Picasso into his own style, and is perhaps his greatest work. It is over six feet high and eight feet wide, depicting "an abstract landscape filled with watery plumes of semi-transparent color that coalesce around spiky, thorn like shapes, painted in thin, sharp black lines, as if to suggest beaks and claws."

Artist Corinne Michelle West was Gorky's muse and probably his lover, although she refused to marry him when he proposed several times. In 1941, Gorky met and married Agnes Ethel Magruder (1921–2013), daughter of Admiral John Holmes Magruder, Jr. (1889–1963). Gorky soon nicknamed her "Mougouch", an Armenian term of endearment. They had two daughters, Maro and Natasha. Maro Gorky became a painter, and married the British sculptor and writer Matthew Spender, son of the poet Sir Stephen Spender. From 1946, Gorky suffered a series of crises: his studio barn burned down (destroying his library and thirty of his paintings), he underwent a colostomy for cancer, and Mougouch had an affair with Roberto Matta. In 1948, Gorky's neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident, and his wife left him, taking their children with her. She later married British writer Xan Fielding. On July 21, 1948, after telling a neighbor and one of his students that he planned to commit suicide, Gorky was found hanged in his studio. On a nearby wooden crate he had written "Goodbye My Loveds". He is buried in North Cemetery in Sherman, Connecticut.

Arshile Gorky was recorded at birth as Ոստանիկ Մանուկ Ատոյեան. His recorded languages were English and Armenian. He married Marny George and Agnes Magruder. 2 children are recorded: Maro Gorky and Natasha Gorky.

Arshile Gorky is recorded as Ottoman Empire, United States and First Republic of Armenia. Established in Bibliothèque nationale de France under 11943578q. Established in Library of Congress under n79082320. Established in RKDartists under 32837. Established in Discogs under 4054492. Established in FAST under 39776.