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Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
Nominated for the Pulizter Prize, "the definitive biography of Arshile Gorky--lucid, persuasive, intimate and refreshingly clear-eyed" (Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review)
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 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."
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 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."
- GenresArtBiographyNonfiction
784 pages, Paperback
First published July 14, 2003
About the author
Hayden Herrera
27 books196 followersHayden Herrera is an art historian. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Mary Frank; and Matisse: A Portrait. She is working on a critical biography of Arshile Gorky. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 22, 2009
The first 100 pages deal with Gorky's childhood and surroundings in the traditional Armenian areas of the Ottoman Empire and later, when he and his family fled the Turkish massacres of Armenians, in Russian Armenia (the present independent country of Armenia). Herrera personalizes the massacres by connecting these horrors to Gorky's family, but much of these pages includes specifics of wider history, especially in connection with the Turkish destruction of the city of Van by Jevdet Bey (she includes the story of Jevdet Bey, the governor of Van, known as the Iron Marshall because he had horsehoes nailed to the feet of Aremenians and made them dance until they collapsed, a story familiar to readers of Armenian Genocide materials) (p. 60). There are wonderful photographs of Gorky's own art and of him and his family.
December 14, 2025
Exquisitely written narrative of a troubled man and his beautiful work. There’s no whitewashing, but it certainly leads to a greater appreciation of his art. Highly recommended
September 2, 2019
Gorky comes aliveI became interested in Arshil Gorky after watching, "Ararat," Atom Egoyan's masterful film about the Armenian holocaust. I knew nothing about his art or his place in the annals of art history. Hayden Herrera does a wonderful job giving us a portrait of a troubled eccentric who is also a genius. In particular, she does a terrific job showing his complicated relationship with his homeland. His wife didn't learn until after Gorky was dead that he was Armenian. He told her he was Russian. Herrera also does a good job of interpreting his art, helping the reader make sense of his semi-abstractions. The book includes more than one hundred prints of his artwork and that helps show his artistic journey.
The book is less successful in providing a look at the milieu of New York City art world. There is much discussion in a summary way about the conflicted role Gorky held in relationship to the surrealists but I didn't get a good sense of who the surrealists were and how they interacted with Gorky. Nor are we sure of how Gorky interacted with the abstract expressionists. Some of this failing maybe intentional as Herrera focuses on Gorky's marriage in the nineteen forties and quotes extensively from his wife's letters. Herrera may feel that her job is to help us understand the man through the most significant relationship in his life rather than by focusing his relationship with his peers.
Despite these failings, I think this biography provides an extremely vivid portrait of Gorky the man and the artist. Although his life was often hard and he died relatively young (at age 48), Gorky emerges from these pages a glorious artist who created art that was both self-consciously derivative and highly original. Go figure!
The book is less successful in providing a look at the milieu of New York City art world. There is much discussion in a summary way about the conflicted role Gorky held in relationship to the surrealists but I didn't get a good sense of who the surrealists were and how they interacted with Gorky. Nor are we sure of how Gorky interacted with the abstract expressionists. Some of this failing maybe intentional as Herrera focuses on Gorky's marriage in the nineteen forties and quotes extensively from his wife's letters. Herrera may feel that her job is to help us understand the man through the most significant relationship in his life rather than by focusing his relationship with his peers.
Despite these failings, I think this biography provides an extremely vivid portrait of Gorky the man and the artist. Although his life was often hard and he died relatively young (at age 48), Gorky emerges from these pages a glorious artist who created art that was both self-consciously derivative and highly original. Go figure!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews