Arshile Gorky

Rating:
Summary: Gorky comes alive
Review: I became interested in Arshil Gorky after watching, "Ararat," Atom Egoyan's masterful film about the Armenian holocaust. I knew nothing about his art or his place in the annuals of art history. Hayden Herrera does a wonderful job giving us a portrait of a troubled eccentric who is also a genius. In particular, she does a terrific job showing his complicated relationship with his homeland. His wife didn't learn until after Gorky was dead that he was Armenian. He told her he was Russian. Herrera also does a good job of interpreting his art, helping the reader make sense of his semi-abstractions. The book includes more than one hundred prints of his artwork and that helps show his artistic journey.

The book is less successful in providing a look at the milieu of New York City art world. There is much discussion in a summary way about the conflicted role Gorky held in relationship to the surrealists but I didn't get a good sense of who the surrealists were and how they interacted with Gorky. Nor are we sure of how Gorky interacted with the abstract expressionists. Some of this failing maybe intentional as Herrera focuses on Gorky's marriage in the nineteen forties and quotes extensively from his wife's letters. Herrera may feel that her job is to help us understand the man through the most significant relationship in his life rather than by focusing his relationship with his peers.

Despite these failings, I think this biography provides an extremely vivid portrait of Gorky the man and the artist. Although his life was often hard and he died relatively young (at age 48), Gorky emerges from these pages a glorious artist who created art that was both self-consciously derivative and highly original. Go figure!