Arshile Gorky: Pioneer of Abstract Expressionism
Arshile Gorky (April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948) was an Armenian-American painter. His later work presaged and exerted seminal influence on abstract expressionism, establishing him alongside Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century.
Early Life and Education
Born Vostanik Manoug Adoian in the village of Khorgom on the shores of Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire, Gorky’s early years were marked by displacement and loss. His father emigrated to the United States in 1908 to avoid the draft. In 1915, Gorky fled Van during the Armenian genocide, escaping with his mother and three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. His mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Arriving in America in 1920 at age 16, Gorky was reunited with his father in Providence, Rhode Island, though the two never grew close.
Reinventing himself, Gorky adopted the name “Arshile Gorky,” claiming Georgian nobility and even suggesting kinship to Russian writer Maxim Gorky. In 1923, he enrolled in the recently founded New England School of Art in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor there.
Career and Achievements
Gorky’s artistic development moved through distinct phases. During the early 1920s he was influenced by Impressionism, later shifting toward Post-Impressionism while living in New York and studying Paul Cézanne’s work. In 1925, Edmund Greacen of the Grand Central Art Galleries invited him to teach at the Grand Central School of Art, a position he held until 1931. Among his notable students was Revington Arthur.
In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Schwabacher, who became his lifelong friend and first biographer. That same year, he produced works including Landscape in the Manner of Cézanne and began Landscape, Staten Island (1927–1928). By 1931, his work had attracted the attention of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who purchased a Cézannesque still life titled Fruit from the Downtown Gallery in New York.
In 1935, Gorky became one of the first artists employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, joining a roster that would include Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera, and Mark Rothko. That year he also signed a three-year contract with the Guild Art Gallery in New York, which organized his first solo exhibition, Abstract Drawings by Arshile Gorky.
At the close of the 1920s and into the 1930s, Gorky experimented with cubism before moving toward surrealism. The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926–1936), based on a childhood photograph taken in Van, became a memorable work; he created two versions, one now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting draws comparisons to Ingres for its line simplicity, Egyptian funerary art for its pose, Cézanne for planar composition, and Picasso for form and color.
The series Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930–1934) characterized this phase of his work. Portrait of Master Bill was long believed to depict his friend Willem de Kooning, who said of their meeting: “I met a lot of artists – but then I met Gorky … He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable.” Recent scholarship, however, identifies the subject as a Swedish carpenter Gorky called “Master Bill,” who worked for him in exchange for art lessons.
In the 1940s, Gorky’s work underwent a decisive shift. When he showed new paintings to André Breton, the Surrealist leader declared The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb “one of the most important paintings made in America” and recognized Gorky as a Surrealist. The painting was exhibited in the Surrealists’ final show at the Galérie Maeght in Paris in 1947. Created in 1944, it marked his emergence from the influence of Cézanne and Picasso into his own mature style—an abstract landscape over six feet high and eight feet wide, filled with watery plumes of semi-transparent color around spiky, thorn-like shapes rendered in thin, sharp black lines.
Notable Events and Milestones
Gorky’s experience as a survivor of the Armenian genocide profoundly shaped his artistic vision. His trauma and displacement informed the emotional depth of works like The Artist and His Mother, which drew on memories of his childhood in Van before the catastrophe. The 1944 creation of The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb represented a watershed moment, synthesizing his earlier studies of modernist masters with a personal visual language that would influence the emerging abstract expressionist movement.
Additional Resources
Gorky’s life and work remain subjects of scholarly study and exhibition. For deeper exploration of his artistic development, influence on abstract expressionism, and the biographical complexities surrounding his identity and survival of genocide, readers may consult his first biography by Ethel Schwabacher, museum archives, and the extensive Wikipedia entry and other biographical resources dedicated to his legacy.
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