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.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was an American photographer best known for her portraits of interwar cultural figures and her photographs of 1930s New York. Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and co-founder of The White Review.

Essayist Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986.

Allison Katz is a Montreal-born artist and writer who currently lives and works in London.

Tamar Kharatishvili is an art historian and co-editor of Frida Kahlo's Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds.

Christa Noel Robbins is associate professor of art history at the University of Virginia and author of Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting.

Emily Warner is an art historian teaching at the University of Oklahoma. Her current book project is Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Mid-century.

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