Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky was a pivotal figure in 20th-century art whose work bridged European modernism and the nascent Abstract Expressionist movement in America. Born Vosdanig Adoian around 1904 in an Armenian and Kurdish province in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), he fled the Armenian genocide before emigrating to the United States in 1920. Reinventing himself under the name Arshile Gorky — adopting an identity part-myth, part-aspiration — he studied and later taught at the Grand Central School of Art in New York.

In his early years, Gorky’s painting reflected a deep engagement with Cézanne, Picasso and Miró, whose work he encountered through books and exhibitions. Though often derivative at first, Gorky used imitation as a means of absorption and eventual transformation. By the late 1930s, his style evolved into something unmistakably his own: a lyrical abstraction steeped in memory, displacement and personal mythology. Works like The Artist and His Mother (begun in 1926, reworked for years) offered a haunting dialogue between past and present, drawing from a photograph taken before his family's displacement.

The 1940s marked a period of creative and emotional intensity. Influenced by Surrealism and its embrace of automatism, Gorky developed a visual language of organic forms, floating symbols and tactile brushwork that anticipated the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism. Paintings such as The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944) and One Year the Milkweed (1944) showcased his masterful synthesis of emotion and abstraction.

Despite critical recognition, Gorky’s final years were marked by personal tragedy, including a devastating studio fire, a cancer diagnosis and the breakdown of his marriage. In 1948, he took his own life at the age of 44. Yet his legacy endures: for many, he was the spiritual father of Abstract Expressionism, his work laying the groundwork for artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Today, Gorky’s paintings are held in major collections worldwide, including MoMA, the Whitney and the Tate.