Arshile Gorky valuation
Armenian-American painter whose fluid, biomorphic abstractions opened the way to Abstract Expressionism.
Arshile Gorky was born Vostanik Adoian around 1904 in Khorgom, on Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire.
What a work by Arshile Gorky is worth
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Bio
Arshile Gorky was born Vostanik Adoian around 1904 in Khorgom, on Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire. He survived the Armenian genocide, fleeing Van with his mother and sisters in 1915; his mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919, and in 1920 he reached the United States, where he took the name Arshile Gorky. He studied and taught in Boston and from 1925 taught at the Grand Central School of Art in New York, working through Cézanne and Picasso before arriving, in the 1940s, at a fluid, biomorphic abstraction of thin washes and drawn lines, shaped by Surrealism and memories of his childhood, in paintings such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb and One Year the Milkweed of 1944. In 1946 a studio fire destroyed many of his works and he was treated for cancer, and in 1948, after a car accident and the breakdown of his marriage, he died by suicide at Sherman, Connecticut.
His mature paintings are mostly in museums, and his drawings, central to his work, appear more often than the oils. The Arshile Gorky Foundation's catalogue raisonné is the reference, and the authenticity of unrecorded works is a live question; one was the subject of the BBC's Fake or Fortune? in 2023.
Van, New York and The Liver is the Cock's Comb
He married Agnes Magruder in 1941, and their daughter Maro Gorky became a painter.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art held a retrospective in 2009, which travelled to Tate Modern and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
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