ABOUT ARSHILE GORKY
Childhood
It is not exactly known when Arshile Gorky was born. 1904 is widely accepted as the year of his birth, but the precise date remains a mystery because the artist adopted the habit of changing his birthday, year after year, while residing in New York. As a child, the artist survived the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turks. With his family displaced and dispersed, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Gorky's arms in 1919. His father, however, had escaped the Turkish military draft by moving to the United States in 1908 and settling in Providence, Rhode Island. Gorky would join his father in 1920 at the age of 15 after leaving the war-ridden territory of the collapsed Russian Empire.
Early Training
Arshile Gorky remained a largely self-taught artist before his immigration to the United States. Here he enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, which he attended from 1922 to 1924. His new home provided the artists with his first exposure to the discourses of artistic modernism, whose founding fathers, such as the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, would exercise a great deal of influence on Gorky's own work in this formative period. Around 1925 Gorky moved to New York where he swiftly penetrated the emerging artistic milieu and enjoyed an ever more expansive introduction to the current artistic trends, including the groundbreaking innovations of Pablo Picasso as well as the early work of Spanish Surrealist painter Joan Miró.
ARMENIAN-AMERICAN DRAFTSMAN AND PAINTER
Born: April 15, 1904 - near Van, Turkey
Died: July 21, 1948 - Sherman, Connecticut
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SOURCE: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/gorky-arshile/life-and-legacy/
QUOTE BY ARSHILE GORKY
“Abstractions allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes…Abstract art enable the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into the unknown areas.” - Arshile Gorky
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
To see beyond what the physical eye cannot see; to experience an explosion of the mind.