Arshile Gorky’s artistic reinvention in New York during a city’s rise to cultural prominence.
In a period that saw Manhattan host the premiere of George Gershwin’s musical composition ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ and the construction of skyscrapers that define New York to this day, a young Armenian painter and refugee named Vosdanig Manuk Adoian moved to the city and gave himself a new name: Arshile Gorky.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Publishers
Hailed by some as the ‘last Surrealist’ or the ‘first Abstract Expressionist,’ the artist embarked on a journey of self-reinvention and aesthetic innovation that would parallel New York’s own transformation from an emerging city into a surging metropolis and a cultural epicenter.
This richly illustrated publication is the result of Hauser & Wirth’s ongoing close collaboration with the Arshile Gorky Foundation, which supplied many of the images and spearheaded the book’s chronology and maps. With numerous Gorky paintings, studies of his mural projects and works on paper alongside contemporaneous photographs of New York by Berenice Abbott and archival images of the artist, this publication brings the years after Gorky’s arrival in New York vividly to life.
Gift of Edward Joseph Gallagher, Jr. © Arshile Gorky Foundation.
Edited and introduced by Ben Eastham, ‘Arshile Gorky: New York City’ features new scholarship by leading writers and art historians on Gorky’s Manhattan years. Christa Noel Robbins reflects on the relationship of the artist’s life and work as a ‘framing question’ that would come to define modernist painting in the United States.
Emily Warner examines Gorky’s murals as ‘both part of and distinct from the urban fabric—a public art that pulses with its own, often fantastical, energies.’ Tamar Kharatishvili investigates the artist’s blending of fact and fiction via questions of identity and fraught ideas of ‘originality,’ while painter Allison Katz meditates on her early encounter with a work of Gorky’s and his enduring influence on her own artistic development.
‘Arshile Gorky: New York City’ (2025), Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Publishers
In the book’s final essay, Adam Gopnik reflects on the relationship of Gorky’s painting to time,
place, and ‘personal truths.’ At the same time, ‘Arshile Gorky: New York City’ unpacks 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. If Gorky is a great American painter, it is at least in part because—as Eastham writes—like New York City, he contains multitudes.
ARSHILE GORKY: NEW YORK CITY
English
Paperback
24 x 17 cm; 244pp
978-3-907493-06-9
£32.00 / $38.00 / €35.00
Texts by Ben Eastham, Adam Gopnik, Allison Katz, Tamar
Kharatishvili, Christa Noel Robbins, and Emily Warner
©2025 Hauser & Wirth Publishers
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