From Publishers Weekly
Most recently seen as a silent, enigmatic figure in the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's Ararat, modernist painter Gorky (1900?-1948) is fastidiously served in this comprehensive biography. Born near Lake Van in Ottoman-held Armenia, the young Gorky witnessed the Armenian genocide, a horror that Herrera (Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo) covers with extreme care. Following Gorky's emigration to the U.S. in 1920 and his name change from Manouk Adoian (he claimed to be the cousin of Russian writer Maxim Gorky), Herrera establishes the bulk of the narrative around Gorky's paintings, describing what he was working on when and under what circumstances. Most of Gorky's work life was based in New York, where, by the 1930s, he was paid a salary by the WPA for murals and other work in his surrealist style, largely derived from Miro and Leger, as the 64 pages of color and b&w images affirm. Herrera expects and encounters many difficulties in untangling the secretive Gorky's feelings and mostly confines herself to quoting others extensively, including long passages from the letters of Gorky's American wife, Agnes Magruder (or as Gorky called her, "Mougouch"). Herrera's restraint and suspension of judgment can flatten out events, yet she lingers for paragraphs on Gorky's many paintings, describing them, speculating on their meanings with lucidity and documenting their sales. The result is a book that, exhaustive in its research, will be a starting point for scholars and critics, but that will fail to engross casual readers. Conversely, readers already familiar with Gorky who are looking for political meanings to his suicide, shown here as undertaken in physical and marital distress, may find less than they are looking for.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
For Arshile Gorky, born Vosdanig Adoian in Armenian Turkey around 1900, painting was "like trying to twist the devil," a phrase emblematic of the heroic struggles of his brief and arduous life. Secretive about his painful past, especially his survival of the Armenian holocaust (his mother died in his arms), he changed his name and posed as a Russian after arriving in the U.S. A born artist, tall, dramatic, fastidious, and forever poor, Gorky worked tirelessly to develop a unique visual language. Herrera, also the author of a Frida Kahlo biography, assiduously chronicles every aspect of her subject's difficult life, particularly his conflict-ridden relationships with women and the despair that led to his suicide at age 45. Curiously, both she and fellow Gorky biographer Matthew Spender (From a High Place [1999]) have a family connection: Spender married Gorky's elder daughter, whose mother is Herrera's godmother. Monumentally detailed and deeply moving, Herrera's illuminating portrait perceptively traces the progression of Gorky's work, and the tragic link between the terrors of his youth and the traumas of his last days. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Born in Turkey around 1900. Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky - and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher in Boston, then New York, and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cezanne and Picasso.

By the 1940s, Gorky had developed a style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generations of American painters who came of age after World War II, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire that destroyed dozens of his paintings, a wasting battle with cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948.

SYNOPSIS

The Armenian painter Arshile Gorky (d.1948), who immigrated to the US and whose painting is considered essential to the development of modernism in the US, is the subject of a fine biography by Herrera (the author of other artists' biographies, including that of Frida Kahlo). Gorky, who was influenced by Cézanne and Picasso, was actively involved in the New York art scene of the 30s and 40s. Herrara closely follows Gorky's artistic and professional development, while providing an account of his personal life. The volume is heavily illustrated with groups of b&w and color plates of Gorky and his work. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

By the end of Ms. Herrera's accelerating narrative, you may wish it would continue, following Gorky's widow and daughters as they come to terms with the legacy he left them. Perhaps Ms. Herrera's next book will tell that story. It seems to be one that she knows exceptionally well. — Roberta Smith

The Los Angles Times

it is hard to imagine that Herrera's study will soon be superseded. — Arthur C. Danto

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Hayden Herrera has written the definitive biography of Arshile Gorky -- lucid, persuasive, meticulous, intimate and refreshingly cleareyed. Gorky is the sort of artist who in his life as much as his work invites extreme responses; and some of his biographers and critics have been unable to avoid lionizing him as the singular genius of his generation or dismissing him as a slave to greater masters. Herrera recognizes his strengths and weaknesses. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work makes the case for his position as the bridge between European Cubism and Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, but acknowledges that some of his work is simply a restatement of Matisse, Picasso or Miro. — Andrew Solomon

Publishers Weekly

Most recently seen as a silent, enigmatic figure in the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's Ararat, modernist painter Gorky (1900?-1948) is fastidiously served in this comprehensive biography. Born near Lake Van in Ottoman-held Armenia, the young Gorky witnessed the Armenian genocide, a horror that Herrera (Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo) covers with extreme care. Following Gorky's emigration to the U.S. in 1920 and his name change from Manouk Adoian (he claimed to be the cousin of Russian writer Maxim Gorky), Herrera establishes the bulk of the narrative around Gorky's paintings, describing what he was working on when and under what circumstances. Most of Gorky's work life was based in New York, where, by the 1930s, he was paid a salary by the WPA for murals and other work in his surrealist style, largely derived from Miro and Leger, as the 64 pages of color and b&w images affirm. Herrera expects and encounters many difficulties in untangling the secretive Gorky's feelings and mostly confines herself to quoting others extensively, including long passages from the letters of Gorky's American wife, Agnes Magruder (or as Gorky called her, "Mougouch"). Herrera's restraint and suspension of judgment can flatten out events, yet she lingers for paragraphs on Gorky's many paintings, describing them, speculating on their meanings with lucidity and documenting their sales. The result is a book that, exhaustive in its research, will be a starting point for scholars and critics, but that will fail to engross casual readers. Conversely, readers already familiar with Gorky who are looking for political meanings to his suicide, shown here as undertaken in physical and marital distress, may find less than they are looking for. (July) Forecast: The Gorky of the film Ararat is an early Gorky, who paints in an autobiographically realist style. This book will find some readers looking for more than the movie gave them, but the lack of a forthcoming major Gorky retrospective is a drawback. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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