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Arshile
Gorky was born Vosdanik Adoian in the village of Khorkom,
province of Van, Armenia, on April 15, 1904. The Adoians
became refugees from the Turkish invasion; Gorky himself
left Van in 1915 and arrived in the United States about
March 1, 1920. He stayed with relatives in Watertown,
Massachusetts, and with his father, who had settled in
Providence, Rhode Island. By 1922 he lived in Watertown and
taught at the New School of Design in Boston. In 1925 he
moved to New York and changed his name to Arshile Gorky. He
entered the Grand Central School of Art in New York as a
student but soon became an instructor of drawing; from 1926
to 1931 he was a member of the faculty. Throughout the 1920s
Gorky's painting was influenced by
Georges Braque,
Paul Cézanne,
and, above all,
Pablo Picasso.
In 1930 Gorky's work was included in a group show at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the thirties he
associated closely with Stuart Davis,
Willem de Kooning,
and John Graham; he shared a studio with de Kooning late in
the decade. Gorky's first solo show took place at the Mellon
Galleries in Philadelphia in 1931. From 1935 to 1937 he
worked under the WPA Federal Art Project on murals for
Newark Airport. His involvement with the WPA continued into
1941. Gorky's first solo show in New York was held at the
Boyer Galleries in 1938. The San Francisco Museum of Art
exhibited his work in 1941.
In the 1940s he was profoundly affected by the work of
European Surrealists, particularly
Joan Miró,
André Masson, and Matta. By 1944 he met André Breton and
became a friend of other Surrealist emigrés. Gorky's first
exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York took place
in 1945. From 1942 to 1948 he worked for part of each year
in the countryside of Connecticut or Virginia. A succession
of personal tragedies, including a fire in his studio that
destroyed much of his work, a serious operation, and an
automobile accident, preceded Gorky's death by suicide on
July 21, 1948, in Sherman, Connecticut.
-Source: guggenheimcollection.org
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