Collection: Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (c. 1904–1948) was an Armenian-born American painter whose late work, combining Surrealist automatism with gestural abstraction, made him a crucial bridge between European modernism and the emerging New York School. Arriving in the United States in 1920, he spent decades absorbing Cézanne, Picasso, and Miró before developing a distinctive biomorphic language of fluid, layered forms. His work was championed by André Breton and exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York; a major retrospective was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1951.