A thoughtful, emotionally engaged biography of one of the most
talented - and secretive - abstract painters of the 1940s. To
research this book (at the outset, anyway) Spender had only to turn
his own extended family; he married Gorky's eldest daughter, Maro,
in 1967. But the task was a challenge: Gorky (1904 - 48) excelled
in spinning myths and was incredibly closemouthed about his past,
even with his second wife, Mougouch, and their children. The facts
suggest a credible reason: Born Vostanig Adoian to a poor Armenian
farmer in eastern Turkey, the boy fled his homeland with his mother
and siblings when the Turks began massacring Armenians in 1915.
They eventually made it to the US, arriving in the Armenian enclave
of Watertown, Mass., in 1920. Vostanig changed his name to Arshile
Gorky (probably lifting the surname from novelist Maxim Gorky) and
began a career as an artist. Wildly talented and able to copy the
style of everyone from Cezanne to Picasso, he found his way to New
York in 1925. His elusiveness and occasionally abrasive intensity
kept other artists at arm's length, however; only a few, including
Willem de Kooning, remained lifelong friends. As his career
progressed, this intensity slowly began to take an ever greater
toll on Gorky's mental stability. Spender does not gloss over his
subject's difficulties; he writes most powerfully, in fact, of
Gorky's terrifying psychological demise and eventual suicide. The
rest of the book, however, suffers from the author's prosaic
narrative style; as smoldering a character as Gorky surely merits a
biography with more passion and fire than this. Approaching the
enigma of the man, Spender (Within Tuscany: Reflections on Time and
Place, 1992) looks for literal meaning beneath the artist's
metaphors; although he does a thoroughly credible job, Gorky
remains elusive and mystifying. (Kirkus Reviews)
An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey,
Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a
painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his
alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood - his family fled the
Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915 - he changed his name and
created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky
bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract
expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter.
His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko,
among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells
the story of Gorky's life and career.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
