Arshile Gorky: New York City [Paperback]

Celebrating 100 years since Arshile Gorkys arrival in New York, this illustrated reader unpacks the mutually influential relationship of the young artist and the city

Born in Armenia, the artist Arshile Gorky (190448) immigrated to the United States in 1920 as a teenage refugee. When he finally settled in New York in 1924, he became a central figure of the citys cultural milieu as an artist whose oeuvre straddled the cultural spheres of Europe and North America, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. This illustrated biography examines Gorkys life and work in New York in both art historical and sociopolitical contexts, including Tamar Kharatishvilis exploration of forced displacement and self-fashioning and Allison Katz's recollections of her personal encounter with his work when she was an emerging painter. It introduces readers to a lesser-known side of Gorky as a young, self-mythologizing artist on the verge of changing culture forever. With a clean, accessible design, this volume mixes scholarly research with more literary reflections on New York and the immigrants who built it, both culturally and materially.

Arshile Gorky: New York City honors not just the artist, but art itselfand all artists. It can be read as a guide for emerging artists and a window into the lucid mind of a great one. Out of trauma, Gorky rewrote his life to make great paintings. In doing so, as the book aptly demonstrates, he made himself an original.