From Publishers Weekly
Purely out of artistic ambition, Armenian-American abstract painter Gorky (1895-1948; born in Turkey as Vostanig Adoian) fabricated a new identity, complete with an Ivy League education and personal histories with master artists, on arriving in the United States. Spender (Within Tuscany), who is married to Gorky's oldst daughter, unhesitatingly exposes the painter's many "tall tales." He also assesses Gorky's difficulty in arriving at his own aesthetic until late in life in terms of both the artist's ties to the artistic patriarchs of the previous generation, the Surrealists (including Breton, Duchamp and Brancusi) and his complex status as a forerunner who eventually became alienated from the New York Abstract Expressionists (particularly de Kooning and Rothko). Spender derives much information from anecdotal sources, including an interview with de Kooning, and assumes a chatty tone in dealing with other artists. But he becomes increasingly less sympathetic to Gorky, whose last years are presented from the perspectives of Spender's wife and her mother. Nonetheless, painting constantly despite failing health, family problems and critical indifference, Gorky's frustrations are heartbreaking. Equally compelling is the window opened on New York's art scene when it was still a small clique. Gorky was so in love with the "artist" archetype that he not only lied about himself but also plagiarized anecdotes, artistic statements, love letters and possibly even his own suicide note. Spender preserves the personal dimensions of his subject while demonstrating that the painter should have adopted a youthful declarationA"I shall be a great artist or if not a great crook"Aas his motto. 90 b&w illustrations. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Spender, a sculptor and writer and the husband of Gorkys daughter, provides a personal and intimate biography of the Armenian American abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky (190448). Spenders access to family information and papers provides some fresh views of the life that the artist himself mythologized and obscured. Exiled from his homeland in 1915, Gorky became a follower of the School of Paris, only achieving his personal style five years before his death. Valuable for its use of primary sources and new translations of Gorkys letters and writings, this work focuses on personal biography more than on art history. A number of books on Gorky are in print (another extensive biography has just appeared in England), but noneincluding this oneis completely satisfactory. Nevertheless, Spenders work offers an accessible account of the person and the places of his life. Recommended for large general biography collections or for advanced art history collections that already have more art-historical works on the painter.Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Wall Street Journal, Hilton Kramer
He ... brings to his subject a fine literary talent, an artist's understanding of a vocation akin to his own, and a family connection that has given him access to the materials essential for a definitive biography.... a biography that instantly takes it place among the half-dozen or so best artists' lives that have been written in this century.


The New York Times, Roberta Smith
...Spender's book is a gift to anyone interested in 20th-century American art.... Spender has provided an essential foundation that is, for all its flaws, also unforgettable.


From Booklist
Spender, a sculptor and a writer, has been pondering the artistic glory and emotional tragedy of Gorky's life ever since he married Maro, the artist's elder daughter, in 1967. Gorky, born Vostanig Adoian in 1905, systematically obfuscated his past, spinning fanciful stories about the lost paradise of his childhood in Turkey and never revealing to anyone the horrors of the 1915 Armenian genocide and the grim aftermath that claimed his beloved mother's life. Immediately upon arriving in the U.S. in 1920, he assumed the persona of a Russian emigreartist and began devoting every waking hour to painting, tirelessly pushing the boundaries of personal expression in his lyrical abstractions until cancer crushed his spirit and he committed suicide in 1948. As Spender perceptively chronicles Gorky's life and interprets his complex personality, troubled relationships with women, and close friendships with artists, especially Willem de Kooning and Isamu Noguchi, he reconnects Gorky's hidden past to the vehemence, beauty, and mystery of his work. Spender makes splendid use of materials only he has access to, and succeeds in squashing long-held misconceptions and in presenting Gorky in all his contrariness and genius, love and unending loneliness. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
A thoughtful, emotionally engaged biography of one of the most talentedand secretiveabstract painters of the 1940s. To research this book (at the outset, anyway) Spender had only to turn his own extended family; he married Gorky's eldest daughter, Maro, in 1967. But the task was a challenge: Gorky (190448) excelled in spinning myths and was incredibly closemouthed about his past, even with his second wife, Mougouch, and their children. The facts suggest a credible reason: Born Vostanig Adoian to a poor Armenian farmer in eastern Turkey, the boy fled his homeland with his mother and siblings when the Turks began massacring Armenians in 1915. They eventually made it to the US, arriving in the Armenian enclave of Watertown, Mass., in 1920. Vostanig changed his name to Arshile Gorky (probably lifting the surname from novelist Maxim Gorky) and began a career as an artist. Wildly talented and able to copy the style of everyone from Czanne to Picasso, he found his way to New York in 1925. His elusiveness and occasionally abrasive intensity kept other artists at arm's length, however; only a few, including Willem de Kooning, remained lifelong friends. As his career progressed, this intensity slowly began to take an ever greater toll on Gorkys mental stability. Spender does not gloss over his subject's difficulties; he writes most powerfully, in fact, of Gorky's terrifying psychological demise and eventual suicide. The rest of the book, however, suffers from the author's prosaic narrative style; as smoldering a character as Gorky surely merits a biography with more passion and fire than this. Approaching the enigma of the man, Spender (Within Tuscany: Reflections on Time and Place, 1992) looks for literal meaning beneath the artist's metaphors; although he does a thoroughly credible job, Gorky remains elusive and mystifying. (90 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Praise for
Matthew Spender's
Within Tuscany



"To visit Tuscany at all is a pleasure. To visit it in the company of a guide so finely attuned to eccentric beauty, nuance, and thematic irony is a rare delight."--Boston Sunday Globe

"Matthew Spender's Within Tuscany . . . manages to harvest a
delightful assortment of Italian ephemera while rooting his
account firmly in the Tuscan soil."--The Guardian

"Spender experiences Tuscany . . . with a sculptor's sensibility,
following the contours of the land and the people with deference and grace."--Condé Nast Traveler

"Matthew Spender opens many Tuscan doors and makes many strange, refreshing, and rewarding discoveries. He brings an artist's eye to his subject, a clear and sharp vision that shuns the sentimental and the superficial."--New York Times Book Review


Book Description
An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood-his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915-he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.


From the Back Cover
"One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read." (John Ashbery ) "Mr. Spender's book is a gift to anyone interested in 20th-century American art." (Roberta Smith, New York Times ) "Only in America could an Armenian refugee who never set foot in France become the last great exponent of School of Paris painting and the first great exemplar of the postwar New York School of modernism. So this is an American story, and a classic immigrant's story, too -- one of dislocation and self-discovery, of the tension between inbred and acquired identities -- played out not in tenements or on Main Street but in the lofts and salons of the art world." (Robert Storr, Washington Post Book World )


About the Author
Matthew Spender is a writer and sculptor. He married the eldest daughter of Arshile Gorky in 1968. His previous book, Within Tuscany, is a memoir about the Sienese countryside where they live.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Arshile Gorky, one of the most intriguing figures in modern art, was at the center of the New York art world in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Yet he was never fully recognized as an important painter in his lifetime, and it was only after his death that his reputation soared. In this deeply felt and penetrating biography, Matthew Spender - himself a sculptor and the husband of Gorky's elder daughter - writes with sympathy and perception, and he gets to the heart of his elusive subject. Born in Khorkom, a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky grew up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood: the scars of the 1896 Turkish massacres of his people; then the mass slaughter of 1915 from which his own family fled; the desertion of his father; the dominance of his headstrong and loving mother, who died of starvation after they found shelter in the Caucasus. Making his way to the United States, the young Gorky determined against all odds to become a painter. He buried his past by assuming a new name and identity, and brazened his way into the art world. At once charming and peremptory, seemingly an extrovert but secretive at heart, he could both dazzle and alienate his art students (Rothko was one of his earliest), his fellow painters, and his young loves, as well his potential dealers and patrons. His last years, dogged by tragedy and illness, threatened even the haven of his marriage and family, until finally, in 1948, he took his own life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Economist

Though not neglecting the horrors of the Armenian atrocities, Mr Spender is best at following Gorky￯﾿ﾽs rise through the New York art scene in the 1920s and 1930s, in which he made a reputation but barely made a living: by the end of his life, he had given away more pictures than he had sold.

Andrew Solomon

...Spender...is a sculptor who is married to Gorky's elder daughter, Maro. It is, by the author's own account, his love for his wife that led him to Gorky's problematic career, and this point of origin gives his biography a certain easy intimacy....[He fits] together the bits and pieces of Gorky into a narrative that is astonishingly coherent....This is a kind book and a gentle one, more benevolent, perhaps, than Gorky would have felt he deserved. — The New York Times Book Review

Roberta K. Smith - The New York Times

Gorky's tragic end echoed a beginning so horrific that...it could ultimately neither be faced nor shared....Spender's....access to both people and papers has enabled him to separate fact from fiction as never before....The artist and his art deserve a more psychologically and esthetically perceptive account. But Spender has provided an essential foundation that is, for all its flaws, also unforgettable. \

Publishers Weekly

Purely out of artistic ambition, Armenian-American abstract painter Gorky (1895-1948; born in Turkey as Vostanig Adoian) fabricated a new identity, complete with an Ivy League education and personal histories with master artists, on arriving in the United States. Spender (Within Tuscany), who is married to Gorky's oldst daughter, unhesitatingly exposes the painter's many "tall tales." He also assesses Gorky's difficulty in arriving at his own aesthetic until late in life in terms of both the artist's ties to the artistic patriarchs of the previous generation, the Surrealists (including Breton, Duchamp and Brancusi) and his complex status as a forerunner who eventually became alienated from the New York Abstract Expressionists (particularly de Kooning and Rothko). Spender derives much information from anecdotal sources, including an interview with de Kooning, and assumes a chatty tone in dealing with other artists. But he becomes increasingly less sympathetic to Gorky, whose last years are presented from the perspectives of Spender's wife and her mother. Nonetheless, painting constantly despite failing health, family problems and critical indifference, Gorky's frustrations are heartbreaking. Equally compelling is the window opened on New York's art scene when it was still a small clique. Gorky was so in love with the "artist" archetype that he not only lied about himself but also plagiarized anecdotes, artistic statements, love letters and possibly even his own suicide note. Spender preserves the personal dimensions of his subject while demonstrating that the painter should have adopted a youthful declaration--"I shall be a great artist or if not a great crook"--as his motto. 90 b&w illustrations. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Spender, a sculptor and writer and the husband of Gorkys daughter, provides a personal and intimate biography of the Armenian American abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky (190448). Spenders access to family information and papers provides some fresh views of the life that the artist himself mythologized and obscured. Exiled from his homeland in 1915, Gorky became a follower of the School of Paris, only achieving his personal style five years before his death. Valuable for its use of primary sources and new translations of Gorkys letters and writings, this work focuses on personal biography more than on art history. A number of books on Gorky are in print (another extensive biography has just appeared in England), but noneincluding this oneis completely satisfactory. Nevertheless, Spenders work offers an accessible account of the person and the places of his life. Recommended for large general biography collections or for advanced art history collections that already have more art-historical works on the painter.Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib. Read all 13 "From The Critics" >

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