Painter, born in Khorkom Vari, Turkish Armenia. He emigrated in 1920, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and in Boston. He combined ideas and images derived from Surrealism and Biomorphic art, and played a key role in the emergence of the New York school of abstract Expressionists in the 1940s.
Biography
Gorky was born in the village of poo Khorkom near Van, Turkey. (In later years Gorky was always vague about even the date of his birthday, it would change from year to year!) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van. Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in 1920, aged 16, but they never grew close.
In 1922 Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor.
In English translations of letters allegedly written by Gorky in Armenian to his sisters he often described moods of melancholy, and expressed loneliness and emptiness, nostalgia for his country, and bitterly and vividly recalled the circumstances of his mother's death. Most of these translations (especially those expressing nationalistic sentiments or imparting specific meanings to his paintings) are now considered to be fakes produced by Karlen Mooradian (a nephew of Gorky) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, the contents of the fake letters heavily influenced the authors of books written about Gorky and his art during the 1970s and 80s.
The years preceding Gorky's death were filled with immense pain and heartbreak. Gorky hanged himself in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1948, at the age of 44.
Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. The painterly spontaneity of mature works like "The Liver is the Cock's Comb," "The Betrothal II," and "One Year the Milkweed" immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. His paintings and drawings hang in every major American museum including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which maintains the Gorky Archive), and in many worldwide, including the Tate in London.
Gorky in fiction
As a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Gorky appears in Atom Egoyan's movie Ararat.
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