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The Overlook Press
2000 /
Woodstock
Language: English
Pages: 576
Size: 6 1/4" x 9 1/4"
Books /
Art /
Artists
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Robert Hughes wrote in The Shock of the New, “Gorky was the last major painter Breton claimed for Surrealism and the first Abstract Expressionist as well.” In this first full-scale biography of Arshile Gorky, Nouritza Matossian charts the artist’s tumultuous life from his childhood to his evolution into a key figure on the New York art scene of the 20s, 30s, and 40s to his last tragic years. In Black Angel Matossian uses for the first time Gorky’s original letters in Armenian and other new source material, writing with authority and insight about the powerful influence Gorky’s Armenian heritage had upon his painting. She also provides an informed and important critique of the entire body of Gorky’s major work.
Arshile Gorky is one of the most mysterious of major twentieth-century artists. Born in Armenia as Manoug Adoian, he survived the Turkish genocide begun in 1915 and changed his name—and intimated he was related to the Russian writer—soon after his arrival in America in 1920. Handsome and deeply intense about art, Gorky cut a dramatic figure among the Abstract Expressionists, influencing a generation of painters who saw Gorky as their dark and disturbed angel, including de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock. In his later years, as he lost his family, lost his studio to a disastrous fire, braved cancer, and received a devastating spinal injury, Gorky suffered heroically until he could endure no more, and he finally committed suicide by hanging at the age of 44. This “rare alchemy of scholarship, personal reflection, and historical testimony” (Atom Egoyan) sheds crucial new light on Gorky’s passionate life and monumental legacy.
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