Arshile Gorky: New York

Born in Armenia, artist Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) immigrated to the United States in 1920 as a teenager and refugee. When he finally settled in New York in 1924, he became a central figure in the city's cultural milieu as an artist whose work straddled the cultural spheres of Europe and North America, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

This illustrated biography examines Gorky's life and work in New York in both an artistic and socio-political context, featuring Tamar Kharatishvili's analysis of forced displacement and self-construction, as well as Allison Katz's recollections of her personal encounter with his work as an emerging painter. It presents a lesser-known side of Gorky, that of a young artist mythologising himself, on the verge of changing culture forever. This work combines academic research with more literary reflections on New York and the immigrants who built it, both culturally and materially.