Virtual museum · 12 works
The Khorkom Studio
Arshile Gorky 1904–1948
Արշիլ Գորկի
Arshile Gorky was born Vosdanik Adoian around 1904 in Khorkom, a village on the shore of Lake Van. He survived the Armenian Genocide; his mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. In 1920 he reached the United States, and some years later took a new name.
In New York he taught himself painting by working through Cézanne and Picasso, and by the 1940s he had found a language no one else had: soft, floating shapes, thin washes of colour and a fine running line. Many of those shapes came from Khorkom: his mother's embroidered apron, the fields, the plough.
He is counted among the painters who opened the way for Abstract Expressionism. He died in 1948, at forty-four.
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His biggest canvas of the war years, and the one where everything arrives at once: blazing colour, fleshy shapes, a nervous line darting through. André Breton, who championed him, wrote about this painting in 1945.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Painted from a photograph taken in Van in 1912, the boy and his mother side by side. He worked on it for about ten years, sanding and repainting the surface until it became as smooth as a fresco. It is one of the great images of Armenian memory.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Gorky in his twenties, painting in the manner of Cézanne, the master he was teaching himself from. The heavy, built-up brushwork is the opposite of the airy late work.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Interlocking shapes in a thick, worked surface, still close to Picasso and Miró. Gorky called this his apprenticeship; he was in no hurry.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Bright, interlocking shapes from the early 1940s. They are abstract, but the title points home: Khorkom, the village on Lake Van he left as a boy.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The title says it: an embroidered apron, remembered from childhood, unfolding into a field of soft colour and drifting outlines.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
From the mid-1940s, when Gorky spent his summers in the Virginia countryside drawing directly from grass and flowers. The joke of a title sits on top of a delicate, flickering surface.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Named after a chapter of Kierkegaard. A grey, smoky field crossed by fine black contours: one of his most mysterious paintings.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The plough of his father's fields in Khorkom became a recurring form in his last years. Here it sits in a warm, harvest-coloured ground among softer shapes.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Painted after a fire destroyed much of his studio and after a cancer operation. Hot reds and blacks, sharp hooks of line: the late work at its most intense.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Left unfinished at his death; its second title comes from a story by Chekhov. A white ground torn by black, with sudden notes of red, green and yellow.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
From the early 1930s, when Gorky worked in tightly interlocked forms and limited colour, building the discipline the later freedom grew out of.
Image: Wikimedia Commons