Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (1904–48)

Gorky was born in modern-day Armenia under Ottoman rule. Fleeing poverty and political turmoil, he emigrated to the United States and became ‘a Bridge of Sighs between Surrealism and America’ as the critic Robert Hughes wrote. After an extended apprenticeship to the work of Cezanne, Picasso and Míro, Gorky developed a personally distinctive style which reimagined the world of verifiable appearances in a language of extreme yet organic distortions. His temperament was inclined towards melancholy and his work is often said to be invested with acute feeling. In New York he belonged to a wide circle of friends that included Pollock, de Kooning and others, and his mature work prefigured the heights of Abstract Expressionism achieved in the decade after his suicide.