His Own Private Armenia
Anne Hollander
- Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work by Hayden Herrera
Bloomsbury, 767 pp, £35.00, October 2003, ISBN 0 7475 6647 X - Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings edited by Janie Lee and Melvin Lader
Abrams, 272 pp, £30.00, December 2003, ISBN 0 87427 135 5
Arshile Gorky is better known for his role in 20th-century American art than he is for his actual work. The collective memory, besides noting that his art reputedly links 1930s Surrealism to 1950s Abstract Expressionism, is rather vague about his pictures: were they realistic? Abstract? Easier to remember that he committed suicide, that he was a romantic character, that he was a liar.
These two beautifully illustrated books, one the catalogue for an exhibition of his drawings,[*] the other a detailed Life and Work, are a reminder of the extremely individual character of his work. Equally extraordinary is the record of how a great modern painter created and then destroyed himself in America, having arrived in the United States early in 1920 as Vosdanik Adoian, a 19-year-old refugee from Turkish Armenia.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are a subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to all 12,000 articles subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
[*] Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings opened in November at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and transferred to the Menil Collection in Houston on 5 March.