Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky

The first full-scale new biography of Arshile Gorky, the charismatic, controversial genius of 20th Century art.

Arshile Gorky is one of the most mysterious of major twentieth-century artists. Born Armenian, he adopted the cover of a famous Russian name, and paradoxically helped to change the course of American art. The art critic Robert Hughes wrote in The Shock of the New, "Gorky's life as a mature artist formed a kind of Bridge of Sighs between Surrealism and America; he was the last major painter Breton claimed for Surrealism and the first Abstract Expressionist as well." In this first full-scale biography, Nouritza Matossian charts Gorky's tumultuous life from his childhood to his evolution into a key figure on the New York art scene of the 30s and 40s to his tragic last years.

Handsome and deeply intense about art, he cut a dramatic figure among the Abstract Expressionists, influencing a generation of painters including de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollack. This powerfully revealing biography sheds crucial new light on Gorky's passionate life and monumental legacy.

"A profoundly moving, illuminating biography leaves us with the image of a man of monumental will and spirit, who embraced life with every fibre, and whose sufferings never undermined his integrity either as a man or as an artist."--The Independent