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 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."
Hayden Herrera is also the author of Matisse: A Portrait, Mary Frank, and Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. She lives in New York City.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
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 Gorkyand obliterated his past.
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 generation 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 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 scholarshipand a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintingsArshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."
"The fascinating story of how Gorky overcame his influences and became an artist of singular originality and beauty . . . It is hard to imagine that Herrera's study will soon be superseded."Arthur C. Danto, Los Angeles Times
"A page-turning narrative . . . Skillfully [investigates] how lived experience is transmuted into meaningful works of art."Sue Taylor, Art in America
"The definitive biography of Ashile Gorkylucid, persuasive, meticulous, intimate, and refreshingly clear-eyed."Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review
"The fascinating story of how Gorky overcame his influences and became an artist of singular originality and beauty . . . It is hard to imagine that Herrera's study will soon be superseded."Arthur C. Danto, Los Angeles Times
"The stuff of a page-turning narrative . . . Arshile Gorky offers a more conventional account of the artist's childhood, friendships, employment, marriages, stylistic development, exhibitions, and critical reception . . . Skillfully [investigates] how lived experience is transmuted into meaningful works of art."Sue Taylor, Art in America
"The definitive biography of Ashile Gorkylucid, persuasive, meticulous, intimate, and refreshingly clear-eyed."Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review
"Monumental, superbly crafted . . . Herrera installs Gorky in the reader's mind as a living, bedevilling, unquenchable enigma."Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
"Absorbing [and] compulsively readable . . . All future chroniclers of Gorky's life and artand the two are inseparablewill have to begin with Herrera's book."John Golding, The New York Review of Books
"If it is the biographer's task to establish patterns in remarkable lives, [then the author] has done so admirably, from Gorky's lifelong despair and perpetual feeling of alienation to the salvation he found in the pursuit of aesthetic inquiry and the passion with which he pursued his art."Erin Hogan, The American Scholar
"For Arshile Gorky, born Vosdanig Adoian in Armenian Turkey around 1900, painting was 'like trying to twist the devil,' a phrase emblematic of the heroic struggles of his brief and arduous life. Secretive about his painful past, especially his survival of the Armenian holocaust (his mother died in his arms), he changed his name and posed as a Russian after arriving in the U.S. A born artist, tall, dramatic, fastidious, and forever poor, Gorky worked tirelessly to develop a unique visual language. Herrera, also the author of a Frida Kahlo biography, assiduously chronicles every aspect of her subject's difficult life, particularly his conflict-ridden relationships with women and the despair that led to his suicide at age 45 . . . Monumentally detailed and deeply moving, Herrera's illuminating portrait perceptively traces the progression of Gorky's work, and the tragic link between the terrors of his youth and the traumas of his last days."Booklist
"Details, highs, and despairs of Gorky's life and artistic development are presented sensitively and in-depth by Herrera, with high scholarship, fluid writing style, and penetrating insights. Excellent endnotes; fine selected bibliography; very useful index; 180 images, in black and white and color."J. Weidman, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Choice
"[This is] a lucid life of the émigré Expressionist painter. Born in 1900 in eastern Turkey, Gorky regaled American friends with tales of an idyllic childhood among mountains and rivers. That much was true, as far as it went, though that paradise would be shattered by the onset of the Turkish war of genocide against ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empireand, though he claimed Russian descent and kinship with the writer Maxim Gorky, the man born Mooradian was Armenian through and through. Biographer and art historian Herrera spends a full hundred pages discussing the Armenian milieu that Gorky took pains not to remember before landing his subject, in 1920, in New York and thence Watertown, Massachusetts, where he lived in a neighborhood called Little Armenia and set about training himself as an artist. Gorky soon emerged as an apostle of European modernism, introducing his painting students to the works of his beloved Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque; and though his early work was clearly derivative, he soon developed a d