ArmenPress
April 19 2004

MUSEUM OF ARSHILE GORKY TO OPEN AT ARMENIAN CHURCH PREMISES

YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS: The Armenian Church has announced
about establishment of a museum in one of its premises that will have
on display the works of a renowned US-Armenian artist Arshile Gorky
(Vosdanik Adoyan).
The decision was made in a year which marks the centenary of
Arshile Gorky. The Church said the museum is ready and is waiting for
pictures of Gorky, kept by museums and individuals in many countries,
to come. It said the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church in the
USA is now negotiating with the museums and individuals which are
supposed to send their pictures to Armenia.
Arshile Gorky (1895-1948) was born Vostanik Adoyan in eastern
Turkey. Raised in a poor Armenian farming family, Gorky’s childhood
was reportedly shaped by the genocide of 1915, that affected the
entire Armenian population, and which claimed the life of his mother.
Arshile Gorky was the name the aspiring artist assumed after
coming to the U.S. in 1920. He reportedly adopted it from his
admiration of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Once settled with
relatives in New England he enrolled in art classes. Not long after,
one of his instructors arranged for Gorky to move to New York to work
as an art instructor himself. In the 1930s he achieved his first
public success – producing a large abstract mural painting for Newark
Airport. In his artistic endeavors, Cezanne and Picasso became his
praised models. Other influences came from the surrealist painters
and poets who came to New York as exiles from the war in Europe.
Surrealism’s aspect of automatism, the unconscious and the erotic,
sent him onto a new path in which he newly asserted himself as a
draftsman.