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Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work

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  • Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work

    The Star, Malaysia
    April 2 2004

    Book Review:
    Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
    Author: Hayden Herrera
    Publisher: Bloomsbury

    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
    programme 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 series of
    personal catastrophes: a studio fire that destroyed dozens of his
    paintings, a wasting battle with cancer, and a car accident that
    temporarily paralysed his painting arm. Further demoralised by the
    dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948.


    Hayden Herrera is the author of Mary Frank, Matisse: A Portrait and
    Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. She lives and works in New York.
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