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• Ashes in a Fire Extinguisher, Hitler on His Knees and Dead Pigeons: Maurizio Cattelan Brings “Night” to Berlin

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• iPhone from 1937: A Nearly 90-Year-Old Painting Sparks a Bizarre Conspiracy Theory

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• The Boy Who Looks Like Boris Johnson: Why Steal Renoir at All?

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• Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's Painting Featured on the Cover of Los Angeles Magazine

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In 1920, a young Armenian artist named Vosdanig Manuk Adoian emigrated to the United States, fleeing the Armenian Genocide. After spending four years living with relatives in Massachusetts, he moved to New York City and adopted a new name — Arshile Gorky — in honor of the famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky.

A new book, Arshile Gorky: New York City, edited by Ben Eastham, explores Gorky’s artistic evolution against the backdrop of New York as a modernist art hub, balancing surrealism and abstract expressionism. The volume features essays by writers and art historians examining the artist’s Manhattan years.

In an essay titled “Gorky Again,” Adam Gopnik reflects on how Gorky’s paintings intertwine time and space, offering a fresh perspective on one of his most important double portraits and on Gorky’s experience as an Armenian immigrant in America.

Art Newspaper recently published an excerpt from Arshile Gorky: New York City, shedding light on this fascinating chapter of art history.

«What Arshile Gorky and the other great immigrant observers of America had in common is that each pursued a passion in the modern sense, making art against the grain of commerce, while each underwent a passion in the mythical Greek sense—had some moment of struggle or pain that resolved in art, and, often, in the closest thing artists get to immortality: a place in the collective memory. In the artist’s last interview [1948], he again describes himself as Russian, but also as an “early American”, who, according to his interviewer, “dislikes being called a foreigner and says he is more like one of the first settlers because he can appreciate the advantages of being in America to a far greater extent than those who were born here by ‘lucky accident’”.

With Gorky we sense a classic immigrant’s plight: a desire to restore and recuperate the recipes and precise tastes and qualities of a lost, more savoury and less homogenised past, while making it live within the scale and ambition of American reality. Scale alone becomes a vital form of assimilation: do it big and you do it American. To do “Poussin over entirely from nature” was Cézanne’s cry; to do the artisanal, puzzling, irregular Old-World particularism—a world wrought, as Gorky itemised, from the shape of apricots and baker’s bread—over in a landscape of grand generalisations and unlimited horizons, that was the dream that [Willem] de Kooning and Gorky shared.

And so, we keep coming back to Gorky’s prime, begetting picture, a masterpiece of the American immigrant experience, which is to say of the American experience: The Artist and His Mother (around 1926-36). Taken from a formal photograph, remade over more than a decade, [it is] the foundation of his art. We see boy and mother and know that she will die, unthinkably, of starvation in his arms, as part of the [Armenian] genocide, and never see her son again. The image sits so sharply within our consciousness, no matter how often we return to it, because it offers something not illustrative but iconic, part of now-vanishing stories of loss redeemed by possibility. From starvation and persecution and the wistful enforced formality of the Old World, comes, after a long voyage, energy and hope—and with the hope, a residual longing for the older world, and a need to picture all that happened between the departure and the painting. Gorky’s kind lives as a series of passionate pilgrimages made by improbable arrivals and painters who, however necessarily absurd in their effect at moments, struggled against unimaginable hardship to realise their images.

Gorky's last written words before his painfully premeditated suicide [he took his own life in 1948]—“good-bye my ’loveds,” in one version—were a cry of the heart of a suffering man who loved his daughters, as well as a literary reference to a phrase [the Russian poet and playwright Alexander] Pushkin is reported to have written before he died following a duel. The curse of history and the hope of renewal, old and new drawn together in pain. All artists die in a duel, perhaps the duel of talent against the world. We honour them not by placing them back in history, but by reminding ourselves that what we call history is just what they did, which was everything they could».

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