Arshile Gorky takes his place among the tragic heroes of art history. A survivor of the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was haunted for the rest of his life by the specters of his lost homeland. His vivid, expressionist masterpieces, which anticipated Abstract Expressionism by some 10 years and pioneered abstract art in North America, reflect his enormous suffering as an exile and outsider in America. His work also shows the depth and breadth of his emotional capacity, and the intensity with which he experienced the brief interludes of joy and peace in his life.

Born Vosdanik Adoian on April 15, 1904, he later changed his name to Arshile Gorky when he moved to the U.S., for reasons both personal and practical. His birthplace was the now-demolished city of Khorkom, a tiny village near the beautiful Lake Van in the Western Armenian countryside. His mother, Shushan, introduced Gorky to art before he could even speak, taking him to admire Armenian architecture and ancient painted manuscripts. When Gorky was only six years old, his father, Setrag Adoian, moved to America to find work, like many Armenian men who wanted to avoid conscription while sending money to support their families back home. Gorky stayed with his mother and sisters in Armenia, moving with them first to Van, Old City, in 1910, and later to Aykesdan, Garden City. This separation from his father caused Gorky to feel abandoned and estranged from Setrag for the rest of his life; meanwhile, Gorky's nostalgia for home and especially for his mother, whom he described as "the queen of the aesthetic domain," influenced his work immensely. He referenced the landscape of farm country, rolling hills, and sparkling lakes directly in his later works, such as The Plough and the Song, Garden in Sochi, and The Sun. In addition, his mother is resurrected in two portraits, both entitled The Artist and his Mother, as well as in the seemingly abstract How my Mother's Apron Unfolds in my Life.

The Armenian people had been ruled by the corrupt and tyrannical Ottoman Empire for three centuries, and their history of subjugation by Turkish peoples extends back to the fifteenth century. The beginning of the twentieth century marked the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, which was accompanied by mounting debt and political corruption. Turkish leaders found a scapegoat in the Armenian people, gradually taking away their civil rights until in 1915 the systematic extermination of Turkey's Armenian population was officially declared. Between 1915 and 1918, 1,000,000 Armenians were killed and another 1,000,000 were exiled. Khorkom was destroyed, and the city of Van was bombarded for six months. On June 15, 1915, Gorky's family was forced to embark upon a death march 150 miles north to the border of Russian Armenia. They reached the city of Yerevan on July 16, where they lived on the brink of starvation, with Gorky taking odd jobs as carpenter and printer's assistant, and carving women's combs from bull and ox horns. In 1919, when Gorky was just 14 years old, his beloved mother died of starvation in his arms.

Gorky and his sister Vartoosh fled to New York, arriving at Ellis Island in February of 1920. He moved to Watertown, Massachusetts, to live with his sister, and he got his first taste of art at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, where he spent most of his time after he was fired from his job at a rubber factory for "drawing on the job." Mostly self-educated, Gorky took some painting lessons in the early 1920s from a woman who told him that an Armenian could not be a painter; whereas Russians were considered chic and artistic, Armenians were associated with starving refugees. Gorky thus created a Russian past for himself, sometimes claiming to be a Georgian prince. He wanted to be free of his real past, yet after much consideration he settled on a name that reflected his tormenting experiences: "Arshile" is Russian for Achilles, and "Gorky" translates into "the bitter one."

After intermittently attending the School of Fine Art and Design in Boston, Gorky moved to New York City to attend the National Academy of Design, and he took several teaching jobs as well. Within a few years, "the bitter one" had established himself as a teacher at the New School of Design in New York and gained a small circle of admirers, among them Mark Rothko, who studied under Gorky. During this period, he was doing mostly portraits in an abstract style that was greatly influenced by painters of the School of Paris, such as Matisse, Picasso, and Miró. In 1930, when Alfred H. Barr was preparing a group show for the Museum of Modern Art entitled The Exhibition of Works by 46 Painters and Sculptors Under 35 Years of Age, Gorky had his first big break. After visiting Gorky's studio, Barr chose three still lifes to include in the show, which was to be Gorky's first. Following this show, Gorky was included in an exhibit at the New School, and he was exhibited twice at the Downtown Gallery. In 1935, he achieved even more critical attention by appearing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in a show called Abstract Painting in America, which exhibited four of his works. The Whitney would continue to show his work annually for the next eight years.

Gorky was one of the first artists to enlist with the Public Works of Art project in 1933, formed to give artists work during the Depression. He joined the Artists' Union, which began in 1935 as the first attempt ever to organize artists as laborers in America. Much of the art being created showed a social realist influence, and many of the murals being painted by the PWA resembled propaganda. This context of art "for the masses" and artists as "cultural workers" frustrated Gorky, who believed in the hallowed transcendence of the artist over politics. In a lecture at the Artists' League, he finally broke with the current prominence of overtly political art when he declared it "poor art for poor people!" Despite this antipathy toward political art, he applied to the newly formed Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project in 1935, and began work on a series of murals on the theme of aviation that would occupy much of his attention until he left the WPA in 1939. He also had multiple shows during this time, including a one-person exhibit at the Guild Art Gallery that was highly praised in the New York Post. Around this time he also painted his famous Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series. However, despite the fact that Gorky was well known and respected among artists in New York, he suffered great financial strife. Like many artists who received critical attention during the Depression, he did not reap the rewards until much later, as the few collectors still buying art during this time refused to take chances on newcomers. Gorky often spontaneously sold paintings and drawings for as little as five dollars out of desperation, using the money to buy more painting supplies.

Gorky always worked hard for little material reward, and he was as uncompromising in his personal life as he was in his art. He searched for years to find the "perfect" woman, falling in love three times and getting married once before he finally found her. When he met Agnes Magruder, a wealthy American socialite, he was 40 and she was only 20. When they married, Gorky embarked upon the most productive period of his career, finally coming into his own as an artist. Beginning in 1941 with the Garden in Sochi series, and continuing up to his death in 1948, Gorky created such masterpieces as The Liver is the Cock's Comb, One Year the Milkweed, and Waterfall. He gained much of his inspiration from the landscape surrounding his wife's country home in Connecticut, where they often stayed for extended periods of time, and which reminded him of his lost Armenian homeland.

Gorky and Agnes enjoyed five years of marriage and had two daughters before tragedy returned to Gorky's life. In January of 1946, Gorky's studio, a converted barn on his wife's Connecticut property, burned down, taking with it many of the paintings, drawings, and books Gorky owned. One month later, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent a colostomy, which left him physically handicapped and emotionally scarred. His deteriorating marriage finally exploded when he discovered that Agnes was having an affair with Gorky's friend Matta Echaurren, the Surrealist painter. Soon thereafter, she left, taking his beloved children with him. The same week as his breakup, Gorky was involved in a car accident when the New York gallery owner Julien Levy, who was driving under the influence of alcohol, brought the artist home. Gorky suffered a fractured back and neck and was put in an enormous leather neck brace that held his head up. Shattered physically, emotionally, and spiritually, betrayed by or estranged from everyone he most loved, Gorky retreated to his house in Connecticut, where he hung himself from the rafters of the barn on July 21, 1948. His parting phrase was written in chalk on a crate: "Goodbye, my loveds."

To Gorky, art was nothing short of a necessity; he put his painting before all else, and when all else failed him, he relied upon painting to pull him through. He faced more than his share of misfortunes, which began in his early life and brought him to an early death. In his art he sought to reclaim the past that had been stolen from him, and to shape his future, which always, and ultimately tragically, fell short of his expectations and ambitions.