Arshile Gorky His Life and Work |
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Author:
| Herrera, Hayden |
ISBN: | 978-0-7475-6647-2 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2003 |
Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | AUD $89.95 |
Book Description:
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Born in Turkey in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of the Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation, his sister abandoned to an orphanage (where she disappeared) and his remaining family scattered in their flight from the Turks. Arriving with another sister in Massachusetts, in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky- and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, trained at the Rhode Island School of...
More DescriptionBorn in Turkey in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of the Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation, his sister abandoned to an orphanage (where she disappeared) and his remaining family scattered in their flight from the Turks. Arriving with another sister in Massachusetts, in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky- and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, he found work as an art teacher, moved to New York, and meanwhile undertook a program of rigorous, solitary study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cezanne and Picasso.By the thirties Gorky was recognised as a leader by Willem de Kooning and David Smith among others, but it was only in 1939 that he entered his most fruitful period and developed the style known as Abstract Surrealism. His masterpieces - enigmatic works that both baffled viewers and moved them to tears- established Gorky's genius, and influenced the great generation of post-war American painters, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes. Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth.