Arshile Gorky (1904 - 1948) Armenia Pencil on Paper Measure 11 1/4"in H x 7 1/2"in W and 17" in x 13" in W with frame Known for: Painting-abstract expressionism, surrealism, automatism Living a life dominated by tragedy and despair, Arshile Gorky became one of the most important 20th century artists in abstract painting style. The art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that Gorky was "an artist in exile for whom art became a homeland". (Baigell, 139) Born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian in Turkish Armenia, Arshile Gorky had a happy childhood in his small village but became an Armenian refugee during World War I. He escaped the Turkish slaughter but became a refugee in Russia with his mother and younger sister. The mother died of starvation in his arms. The next year, 1920, he and his sister, Vartoosh, came to the United States to Watertown, Massachusetts and joined their older sisters who had escaped earlier. During World War II, Gorky applied to the draft board to serve as a camouflage artist, but was rejected as being over age. Then when teaching at the Grand Central School of Art, he organized a course in camouflage "voraciously consuming all literature on the subject, a literature that covered data on protective coloring in zoology, optical illusions in the physics of light, and visual reactions to movement in Gestalt psychology" . . .(Behrens, 165). Gorky put a tremendous amount of energy into the project, but the venture was not a success and had to be abandoned. He married in 1941, which brought him the most stable existence he had after much poverty and neglect. He spent much time in Virginia and Connecticut, enjoying the countryside, and he did paintings in a surrealist-influenced style, which he found liberating and uniquely his own. The work of what is considered his mature period is abstract with "extraordinary freedom in its washes and bursts of color" and forms "encoded with erotic symbolism". (Zellman 913)