Arshile Gorky (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 8)
by Melvin Lader
from Abbeville Press
Arshile Gorky (Museum of Modern Art Publications in Reprint)
Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
by Hayden Herrera
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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 and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cézanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, 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.
A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-Arshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."
Arshile Gorky: The man, the time, the idea
From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky
by Matthew Spender
from University of California Press
An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood--his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915--he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.
Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years
Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols
Harry Rand's critically acclaimed study of Gorky's brief, troubled life and artistic development is finally available in paperback.
All of Gorky's major themes are touched on and his major paintings dealt with in some depth, with attention to the details of the individual works, and frequently to the drawings and preliminary studies from which the paintings evolved. The discussion centers on the images that united the pieces as they develop from work to work. Rand explores Gorky as well as possible sources and their relationship to the body of Gorky's art. A concluding chapter reassesses Gorky's impact on the New York School in light of a new understanding of his aims and methods.
Through close study of Gorky's oeuvre, the author deciphers an iconography revealing the unexpected and systematic use of explicit ideas and symbols as well as commonplace objects, settings, and personas from the artist's life.
Arshile Gorky: Paintings, drawings, studies
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
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