Arshile Gorky: New York

Celebrating 100 years since Arshile Gorky’s arrival in New York, this illustrated reader unpacks the mutually influential relationship of the young artist and the city

Born in Armenia, the artist Arshile Gorky (1904-48) immigrated to the United States in 1920 as a teenage refugee. When he finally settled in New York in 1924, he became a central figure of the city’s cultural milieu as an artist whose oeuvre straddled the cultural spheres of Europe and North America, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. This illustrated biography examines Gorky’s life and work in New York in both art historical and sociopolitical contexts, including Tamar Kharatishvili’s exploration of forced displacement and self-fashioning and Allison Katz’s recollections of her personal encounter with his work when she was an emerging painter. It introduces readers to a lesser-known side of Gorky as a young, self-mythologizing artist on the verge of changing culture forever. With a clean, accessible design, this volume mixes scholarly research with more literary reflections on New York and the immigrants who built it, both culturally and materially.