During the first 15 years of his career, Arshile Gorky devoted his efforts as much to the careful study of contemporary art as to the act of painting itself. His personal approach was academic in spirit, though the results were radical, due in part to the mentors he chose. Gorky's eye was uncanny, and his techniques were meticulous. By the mid-1940s, after spending the majority of his career copying the works of others, Gorky transformed his wisdom into a colorful style all his own.

Gorky lived in New York during the 1930s and was deeply involved in the American vanguard movements of that time. In fact, many look to Gorky's works as a barometer of the major trends. During and after World War II, the American art scene was driven primarily by European artistic influences, beginning with Cubism. As early as 1926, Gorky had identified Picasso and Matisse as the artistic "masters" of the 20th century, soon adding Miró and Léger to their ranks. Like his American peers, he modelled many of his early works on their masterpieces.

Soon the Surrealist movement began to flourish in Europe, speading quickly to America. During the war, a number of Surrealist artists emigrated to New York. Young New York artists, including Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, and Still, welcomed the new and exciting atmosphere created by Surrealists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Matta Echaurran and André Breton, the spokesman for the movement. The young Americans embraced the new freedom of "automatism," or painting from the subconscious. Accordingly, their works from the 1940's are replete with surrealistic imagery, primarily painted in blacks, grays, and browns, and mostly executed on small canvases.

But it was Gorky who created the most beautiful and celebrated works of the 1940's, taking Surrealism and making it his own. While the works of his contemporaries were small, his were oversized; while their works were monochromatic, his were vibrant. Gorky was the first American to move beyond mere adaptation of European styles, creating a bold personal style of his own.

For Gorky, the philosophy of Surrealism was a release from the powerful influences of the past, particularly Picasso. Not content with painting imagery of the mind, Gorky painted the world around him, abstracting what he saw into scarcely readable images. He painted still lifes, interiors and landscapes of Virginia, where he summered, and Connecticut, where he lived. One of Gorky's best paintings from the 1940's is Year After Year, a boldly-colored, classic image executed in 1947. The iconography suggests a view of the Housatonic River near Gorky's house in Sherman, Connecticut.

The years 1940 to 1945 were the happiest and most settled in Gorky's life. But this decade was not without its tragedy. In January 1946, a fire destroyed Gorky's studio and much of his current work. In February, he underwent a cancer operation. Miraculously, these two events did not keep this passionate artist from his work, and in the following two years Gorky produced a large number of drawings and some of his best paintings, including Year After Year.

Gorky is remembered today as one of the giants in 20th century American painting, a pioneer of the Post-War Abstract Expressionist movement in American art. He was romantic, eccentric, and in the end highly original, a man who approached everything with passion. Because of the studio fire and subsequent losses, a relatively small group of Gorky's major paintings exist, most of which are in museum collections.