Arshile Gorky

American, ca. 1904–1948

BiographyArshile Gorky was born Vosdanik Manook Adoian in Khorkom Vari Haiyotz Dzor, a village in the province of Van, a center of ancient Armenian culture. From 1914, the Turks' systematic persecution of the Armenians drove the Adoian family and thousands of others out of Van, and eventually on an eight-day march to the frontier of Caucasian Armenia. Gorky's mother died of malnutrition in December 1919, during a winter of severe deprivation for the Armenian refugees. In 1920, Gorky and his sister arrived at Ellis Island, and eventually moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father had emigrated earlier. Gorky moved to New York around 1925, and changed his name.

Until the early 1940s, Gorky thoroughly committed himself to the study (and imitation) of the great modernist masters, particularly Cézanne, Picasso, and Miró. In 1930 he exhibited three still lifes in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, 46 Painters and Sculptors under 35 Years of Age. In 1933 he began a lifelong friendship with Willem de Kooning. His first solo show was held at Mellon Galleries, Philadelphia, in 1934. Gorky joined the WPA in 1935, and worked on various aviation murals (present locations unknown) until 1940. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased Painting in 1936-37. Gorky's best known and final phase of work began shortly after his marriage to Agnes Magruder in September 1941, and a visit to the Connecticut countryside in the summer of 1942. Gorky's "breakthrough" painting (or paintings) was the later canvases of the Garden of Sochi series (1940-43), one of which was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1942.11 The summer of 1943 began a series of visits to Crooked Run Farm, Hamilton, Virginia, where Gorky drew out of doors. Gorky met André Breton and the Surrealists in 1944, and first exhibited at Julian Levy Gallery, New York, in 1945, where he would have annual solo shows through 1948. In January 1945, a fire in his studio in Sherman, Connecticut, destroyed approximately twenty-seven works. Gorky had an operation for cancer the following month, and went to Virginia that summer and fall, where he produced about three hundred drawings. Eight paintings and two drawings were shown in the exhibition Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1946. An automobile accident in June, 1948, broke Gorky's neck and immobilized his painting arm. On July 21 he hanged himself in his Sherman studio.