Enigmatic Combat
Arshile Gorky
ARSHILE GORKY, 1938. OIL ON CANVAS.
Enigmatic is the right word for Arshile Gorky. After he fled his country in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide, he adopted his new name, claimed to be a Georgian Noble, a relative of Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and made a new life for himself in America. By 1924 he was an instructor at the Grand Central School of Art, despite being entirely self-taught, and was participating in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, creating large scale public works and murals alongside Alice Neel, Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera. Gorky was unknowable, in his work and his life. He was both the last Surrealist and the first Abstract Expressionist, and combined pain, nostalgia, nature and violence into a new visual language of colour and form, the influence of which cannot be overstated. He took his own life at the age of 44. Enigmatic Combat could very well be a byword for the life of a mysterious man from Armenia.