Arshile Gorky emigrated to the US to escape the Armenian genocide, later changing his name in honor of Russian poet Maxim Gorky. A publication titled Arshile Gorky: New York City focuses on Gorky’s artistic journey in New York as he merged Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Writers explore his experiences as an Armenian immigrant, highlighting his artistic pursuits against commercialism and the personal struggles that shaped his work. Gorky saw himself as an early American, emphasizing his connection to America's landscape and a desire to preserve his cultural roots.
What Arshile Gorky and the other great immigrant observers of America had in common is that each pursued a passion in the modern sense, making art against the grain of commerce, while each underwent a passion in the mythical Greek sense-had some moment of struggle or pain that resolved in art, and, often, in the closest thing artists get to immortality: a place in the collective memory.
In the artist's last interview [1948], he again describes himself as Russian, but also as an 'early American', who... dislikes being called a foreigner and says he is more like one of the first settlers... who were born here by 'lucky accident'.
With Gorky we sense a classic immigrant's plight: a desire to restore and recuperate the recipes and precise tastes and qualities of a lost, more savoury and less homogenised past, while making it live within the scale and ambition of American reality.
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