Arshile Gorky: New York City

A fascinating examination of influential artist Arshile Gorky's relationship to New York City, exploring notions of exile, identity, and authorship

This book unpacks the relationship between Arshile Gorky and New York, focusing on the artist’s early years in the city following his arrival in 1924 after fleeing the Armenian genocide. What did it mean for an artist who named himself after a Russian writer and pledged allegiance to Picasso to find his own voice in New York?

Embracing the metropolis as a locus of modernity and liberation, Gorky sought to reconcile it with his own cultural and historical inheritance. Bound together in a relationship of mutual influence, Gorky would come to shape the history of New York painting, just as the city had shaped his own work.

Edited by Ben Eastham, this richly illustrated book combines fascinating new insights into Gorky’s work with broader reflections on his status as an immigrant artist, and includes essays by writer Adam Gopnik, art historians Tamar Kharatishvili, Christa Noel Robbins, and Emily Warner, alongside a meditation on Gorky’s enduring influence by painter Allison Katz, and WPA-era images of New York by Berenice Abbott.