Arshile Gorky ( 1904 - 1948)

American painter, born in Turkish Armenia, Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, changed his name to Arshile Gorky upon arriving in the United States in 1920. Gorky took up studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and then moved to New York in 1925 to study and eventually teach at the Grand Central School of Art. He melded the styles of European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism. Gorky was romantic and passionate about his craft and was strongly influenced by the works of Stuart Davis and Pablo Picasso. This influence is particularly seen in The Artist and his Mother and in his more painterly and abstracted Cubist adaptations. Gorky congregated with a group of European immigrant Surrealists in the early 1940’s and continued his abstractions delving into biomorphic forms in a similar vein to those of Miro. The last few years of his life were tragic. In 1946 Gorky’s studio caught fire and destroyed much of his recent work. In the same year he was operated on for cancer. In 1948 he got into a car accident in which he broke his neck and his wife left him shortly after. Gorky ended his life that same year and is considered the last of the great Surrealists and one of the first Abstract Expressionists.