Arshile Gorky2003
His Life and Work
by Hayden Herrera
"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...