Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work

Born in Turkey around 1900. Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky - and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher in Boston, then New York, and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cezanne and Picasso. By the 1940s, Gorky had developed a style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generations of American painters who came of age after World War II, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire that destroyed dozens of his paintings, a wasting battle with cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948.