From the Author of Frida, the Moving and Heroic Story of One of the Central Painters of the Twentieth Century Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky-and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cézanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948. A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-Arshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."

A reexamination of the art of Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), and an exploration of his role in the development of modern abstraction in America.

Harry Rand's critically acclaimed study of Gorky's brief, troubled life and artistic development is finally available in paperback. All of Gorky's major themes are touched on and his major paintings dealt with in some depth, with attention to the details of the individual works, and frequently to the drawings and preliminary studies from which the paintings evolved. The discussion centers on the images that united the pieces as they develop from work to work. Rand explores Gorky as well as possible sources and their relationship to the body of Gorky's art. A concluding chapter reassesses Gorky's impact on the New York School in light of a new understanding of his aims and methods. Through close study of Gorky's oeuvre, the author deciphers an iconography revealing the unexpected and systematic use of explicit ideas and symbols as well as commonplace objects, settings, and personas from the artist's life. Harry Rand's critically acclaimed study of Gorky's brief, troubled life and artistic development is finally available in paperback. All of Gorky's major themes are touched on and his major paintings dealt with in some depth, with attention to the details of the individual works, and frequently to the drawings and preliminary studies from which the paintings evolved. The discussion centers on the images that united the pieces as they develop from work to work. Rand explores Gorky as well as possible sources and their relationship to the body of Gorky's art. A concluding chapter reassesses Gorky's impact on the New York School in light of a new understanding of his aims and methods. Through close study of Gorky's oeuvre, the author deciphers an iconography revealing the unexpected and systematic use of explicit ideas and symbols as well as commonplace objects, settings, and personas from the artist's life.

The show will be comprised of 17 paintings and 23 works on paper from this very influential period in Gorky's brief but potent career. It covers a decade where Gorky's inspirations synthesize to forge a radically new development in American art. Influences ranging from the Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello to Picasso, Miro and the surrealists can be seen in the work. As Michael Auping has asserted, it is during this time that Gorky establishes a complex formal vocabulary that acts as an important link between European surrealism and the development of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition contains pieces from some of Gorky's key serial works. Included are drawings and a painting from the group entitled Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia. This somber, dreamlike series combines bio-morphic abstraction with surrealism. Also included are two paintings and related drawings entitled Khorkom, named after Gorky's birthplace, a town in the Armenian province of Van. In three paintings from the well-known Garden in Sochi series of the early 1940s, Gorky invokes his father's garden in Armenia. His need to reconnect himself with his ancient homeland and with his idealized childhood provides the beguiling imagery that gives Gorky's work its unique quality.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ardent Nature: Arshile Gorky Landscapes, 1943-47, presented at Hauser & Wirth New York, November 2-December 23, 2017.

"One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read."—John Ashbery

Published to accompany the exhibition held at Tate Modern, London, 3 Feb.-3 May 2010.