Arshile Gorky and the Art of Studying Everyone Else First

Feature image: Arshile Gorky, How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, 1944, © Arshile Gorky Foundation, via the Arshile Gorky Foundation [AGCR: P296]

Arshile Gorky worked for roughly twenty-five years, from his arrival in New York in the early 1920s until he died in 1948, and in that short span he became one of the most consequential painters in twentieth-century American art. By the early 1940s, he was exhibiting alongside the European Surrealists who had fled to New York during the war, including André Breton, who championed his work and helped secure his place within the movement. He held a major solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1945, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, by the time of his death, was recognized by younger painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, as a direct and formative influence on what would become Abstract Expressionism.

What rarely makes it into the survey courses is how long it took Gorky to arrive at his mature style, and how openly he borrowed from the painters he admired along the way. His early and middle decades read less like the work of a single artist developing a signature voice and more like a guided tour through three decades of European modernism, conducted by a painter determined to master every language available to him before inventing his own.

Gorky was born Vosdanik Manoog Adoian around 1904 in the village of Khorkom, near Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire's Armenian provinces. His childhood ended early. The Armenian Genocide forced his family into flight, and his mother died of starvation in 1919 while the two of them were displaced together, an event Gorky would spend the rest of his career trying to process on canvas. He emigrated to the United States in 1920, eventually settling in New York, where he adopted the name Arshile Gorky, claiming a fabricated connection to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and, in the process, inventing an entirely new identity to go with his new country.

This act of self-invention shaped how he approached painting. Without formal academic training and with no inherited artistic lineage to draw from, Gorky built his education by studying other painters directly, copying their structures, testing their logic, and absorbing their techniques until he could discard them. He worked for a time as an instructor at the Grand Central School of Art in New York, a position that put him in close, daily contact with reproductions and original works by the European modernists he was teaching himself to paint like, and gave him a working vocabulary of art history that he applied to his own canvases almost immediately.

By the mid-1920s, Gorky had briefly enrolled in art schools in Boston and New York, but his real education came from close looking. His earliest still lifes draw so directly on Paul Cézanne that they read less like homage than like deliberate technical study. Pears, Peaches, Pitcher, painted around 1926–27, is one of the clearest examples, its tilted plate, unevenly massed fruit, and muted earth palette of ochre and sage drawn almost wholesale from Cézanne's own compositional habits.

The resemblance matters less for what it borrowed than for what it taught him. Cézanne worked by treating the canvas as a problem of weight and structure rather than narrative description, building form through repeated, searching brushstrokes that left the underlying geometry visible. Gorky absorbed that method directly, learning to organize a composition around mass and spatial ambiguity rather than illustration. The technical fluency he built here, the patience to let a painting slowly reveal its structure, would resurface decades later in work that bears no visual resemblance to a still life at all.

Through the 1930s, Gorky's catalog reads like a running conversation with the painters of his moment, conducted across nearly every major movement circulating in New York and Paris.

The most significant of these conversations produced The Artist and His Mother. This double portrait would eventually define his public reputation, the image most people picture when they hear his name today. Two stiff, masklike figures stand before a flattened interior, the artist as a boy beside the mother who would later die of starvation. The painting exists in two finished versions, painted years apart: the first, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, largely settled by the mid-1930s, and the second, held at the National Gallery of Art, carried forward into the early 1940s. That image, painted and repainted across more than a decade, is the version of Gorky that survives in textbooks.

The debt in both versions to Edvard Munch is direct and rarely discussed outside specialist literature. The frontal poses, the masklike flatness of the faces, the psychological distance between two figures standing shoulder to shoulder, all of it draws from the same alienated portraiture Munch built his reputation on. Gorky was not copying Munch so much as borrowing his emotional vocabulary to process a loss he could not otherwise articulate. 

Around the same period, in Xhorkom, a canvas named for the village where he was born, Gorky moved into a visual idiom closer to late Cubism and early Pablo Picasso: biomorphic shapes flattened against a shallow picture plane, color blocks doing the work that line had done in his earlier paintings. The personal, autobiographical reference embedded in the title sits in tension with a thoroughly European modernist visual language.

That same period, Gorky was also working at an entirely different scale. Mechanics of Flying, a mural-scale canvas produced under the WPA's Federal Art Project, runs over nine feet wide, its hard-edged, mechanically rendered forms recalling Fernand Léger's industrial Cubism far more than the soft biomorphic shapes Gorky would later be known for. The work was made for public, civic viewing rather than a private collector's wall, and the clarity and scale of the forms reflect that purpose. 

Gorky's stylistic range extended into quieter registers as well. Flowers, a floral still life from the late 1930s, slows everything down. The brushwork loosens, color and light matter more than any hard outline, and the overall mood sits closer to Marc Chagall's softer still lifes, or to early Impressionist painting more broadly, than to anything in his mature output. It is a quiet, almost private picture, made by an artist who would soon abandon recognizable subject matter altogether.

In Composition I, a 1943 work on paper, Gorky drew directly on Wassily Kandinsky, even borrowing the older painter's numbered Compositions as a naming convention. Dense clusters of ink and crayon accumulate with a rhythmic, almost musical energy, color pushing through the linework rather than sitting beside it. It stands as one of the clearest instances in his catalog of an artist absorbing a predecessor's structural logic in real time, with the working-out still visible on the page.

By the early 1940s, the borrowed structures had folded into something unmistakably Gorky's own, and the paintings from this period are the ones that secured his place in art history. Enigma, painted around 1933–34, marks an early turn toward this vocabulary, its biomorphic forms already pulling away from any single recognizable predecessor. 

By the mid-1940s, in paintings such as Diary of a Seducer, a dense, almost monochrome composition built from layered grays and ochres reads like a half-remembered dream, its forms suggesting bodies, tools, and landscape elements without settling into any of them.

Other canvases from the same stretch of years, including Scent of Apricots and One Year the Milkweed, push the palette into deep reds, golds, and greens, with loose, watery washes interrupted by sharp linear drawing, biological and architectural forms pressed together until they become difficult to separate.

From a High Place II, painted in 1946, condenses a tabletop arrangement into the same dissolving vocabulary, objects and figures losing their outlines as they bleed into the surrounding color field. 

The Limit, from 1947, one of his final works, reduces the palette even further, centered on a pale, almost spectral green ground, letting line and gesture carry nearly all of the composition's weight.

This is the vocabulary most closely associated with Gorky's historical reputation: paintings built on a continuous sense of change rather than a fixed, settled composition, the canvas treated less as a window onto a scene than as a record of forms actively becoming something else. The technique took Surrealism's interest in automatic drawing and biomorphic abstraction and pushed it toward a looser, more gestural handling of paint, the direct technical bridge that allowed the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock among them, to scale Surrealist automatism up into the large, aggressive canvases that would define American painting through the 1950s.

Gorky's early decades complicate the myth of the solitary genius arriving at a fully formed style. He built his vocabulary the way most working artists do, through years of close study, imitation, and gradual departure. The paintings that resemble his predecessors are not detours from his real work. They are the work, the visible proof of how an artist with no inherited tradition built one for himself, one borrowed structure at a time, before arriving at the dissolving, biomorphic style that made him historically essential.

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