Volume 50, Number 14 · September 25, 2003
Always in Exile
By John Golding
Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
by Hayden Herrera
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 767 pp., $45.00
Arshile Gorky became a legend during his lifetime. No less a figure than André Breton had declared him to be 'the most important painter in American history.' Clement Greenberg, the most influential American art critic of his age, though originally grudging in his praise, in 1948, the year of Gorky's death, pronounced him to be 'among the very few contemporary painters whose work is of more than national importance.' And yet even today his art awaits the major monograph that it deserves. In recent years, however, he became the subject of two substantial biographies, Matthew Spender's From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (1999) and Nouritza Matossian's Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky (2000).[1] Now we have Hayden Herrera's Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work, the longest and most exhaustive of the three books; as its title suggests, it is also the most ambitious in that it attempts to deal extensively with Gorky's art as well as with his life.
Review, 5422 words
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