Biography: Chances are that the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky is little known here.
An important precursor and contemporary of the American Abstract Expressionists, his own artistic apprenticeship followed a personal trajectory through a select roll-call of European modernists: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Miro. Gorky's painting displays a disconcerting ability to swallow his exemplars whole and produce something perilously close to brilliant pastiche. But all the time, bubbling along like an underground stream, his own vision was looking for an outlet, and found it with his extraordinary run of mature work.
That work depended on his inspired appropriation of surrealist ideas in a series of dreamy, intense, cryptically autobiographical paintings and drawings, all of them made within the final decade of his relatively short life. Though while he lived he never quite achieved the level of acclaim that was his due, he was by no means unappreciated, and he was in the thick of the exciting artistic life of New York in the 1930s and 1940s. He was very friendly with Stuart Davis and John Graham. Willem de Kooning deliberately attached himself to Gorky, becoming his friend without any particular encouragement, because he knew, having visited his studio, that the prickly Armenian "got the point".
Gorky was a brilliant draughtsman and his incisive, whiplash line (you should use a pencil, he said, "like a surgical tool"), his fantastic, exotic, painted gardens of lush biomorphic forms, fed directly into de Kooning's evolving style. It was also apparent to de Kooning that, for the melancholy Gorky: "Nothing really worked so good, paintings and life and the money."
Nothing did work so good. Born Vosdanig Adoian in Turkish Armenia in about 1903 - his true birth date is uncertain - during his childhood years he witnessed the unremitting persecution of the Armenian minority by the Turks. Harassment, subjugation, brutality and casual atrocities eventually escalated into full-scale genocide. Gorky's father went to find work in the United States in 1906, but he never sent back enough money to support his family, and they were for the most part desperately poor and without a settled home. His mother, beaten down by myriad difficulties, died, probably of starvation, when she was just 39. In 1920, Gorky and his sisters followed their father to the US.
Even in Armenia, Gorky, naturally gifted, had found escape from an unpalatable reality by devising an artistic persona for himself, and he continually honed and revised this alter ego in the US. Arshile was a Russian version of Achilles, Gorky was from the writer Maxim Gorky, to whom he claimed, quite fictitiously, distant kinship. Gorky, a big, strong man, affected an aristocratic disdain and seems to have poured all his feelings into his art. Women obviously found him attractive, but his relationships were, to put it mildly, difficult. A stern patriarch, he could be exceptionally demanding, expecting devoted subservience, and he was puritanical and not very interested in sex - oddly, perhaps, given the sensual prodigality of his mature paintings, with their voluptuous, interlocked forms.
Part of the myth Gorky constructed for himself was an idealised early childhood, a bucolic idyll that was by no means entirely at variance with the reality, at least until he was about five years old. This privileged realm was translated into the biological wonderland of the late paintings which, with their precision and apparent descriptiveness, at once invite and repel representational reading. It's probably best not to try to interpret them literally, but rather absorb them on an instinctive, subliminal level. Gorky was fond of saying "never put a face on an image", and he clearly meant it.
Towards the end, misfortune ganged up on him. Much of his work was destroyed in a disastrous studio fire; he found it hard to cope with the consequences of rectal cancer; he broke his neck and, in a way worse, injured his painting arm in a car crash; his wife, the beautiful "Mougouch" - Agnes Magruder - parted from him and he felt, irrationally, that his friends too had deserted him.
Finally overwhelmed, one day in July 1948 he retreated to a barn at his home in Sherman, Connecticut, and hanged himself. Hayden Herrera is a godchild of his widow, and her extensive biography, unfailingly sympathetic to its subject, meticulously researched, hugely detailed and well-written, is definitive.
Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work By Hayden Herrera Bloomsbury, 688pp. £35
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times
