From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky [Paperback]

Matthew Spender (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 23, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Purely out of artistic ambition, Armenian-American abstract painter Gorky (1895-1948; born in Turkey as Vostanig Adoian) fabricated a new identity, complete with an Ivy League education and personal histories with master artists, on arriving in the United States. Spender (Within Tuscany), who is married to Gorky's oldst daughter, unhesitatingly exposes the painter's many "tall tales." He also assesses Gorky's difficulty in arriving at his own aesthetic until late in life in terms of both the artist's ties to the artistic patriarchs of the previous generation, the Surrealists (including Breton, Duchamp and Brancusi) and his complex status as a forerunner who eventually became alienated from the New York Abstract Expressionists (particularly de Kooning and Rothko). Spender derives much information from anecdotal sources, including an interview with de Kooning, and assumes a chatty tone in dealing with other artists. But he becomes increasingly less sympathetic to Gorky, whose last years are presented from the perspectives of Spender's wife and her mother. Nonetheless, painting constantly despite failing health, family problems and critical indifference, Gorky's frustrations are heartbreaking. Equally compelling is the window opened on New York's art scene when it was still a small clique. Gorky was so in love with the "artist" archetype that he not only lied about himself but also plagiarized anecdotes, artistic statements, love letters and possibly even his own suicide note. Spender preserves the personal dimensions of his subject while demonstrating that the painter should have adopted a youthful declarationA"I shall be a great artist or if not a great crook"Aas his motto. 90 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Spender, a sculptor and writer and the husband of Gorkys daughter, provides a personal and intimate biography of the Armenian American abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky (190448). Spenders access to family information and papers provides some fresh views of the life that the artist himself mythologized and obscured. Exiled from his homeland in 1915, Gorky became a follower of the School of Paris, only achieving his personal style five years before his death. Valuable for its use of primary sources and new translations of Gorkys letters and writings, this work focuses on personal biography more than on art history. A number of books on Gorky are in print (another extensive biography has just appeared in England), but noneincluding this oneis completely satisfactory. Nevertheless, Spenders work offers an accessible account of the person and the places of his life. Recommended for large general biography collections or for advanced art history collections that already have more art-historical works on the painter.Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520225481
• ISBN-13: 978-0520225480
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #287,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gorky's son in law, October 9, 2006

By 

Winston hough "klee fan" (Glenview, Il. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Paperback)

Matthew Spender has something to offer for someone really curious about this artists work. I have been comparing the three biographies. Herrara's book has been much acclaimed. But, when it comes to getting into the nitty -gritty of an artist's work, Spender is better. Particularly when he writes of his work in the fields of Virginia.None of the other writers have really tackled this important part of Gorky's art. As a sculpture Spender must have wondered would Gorky like me and my work.The Armenian backgound has been covered by quite a few books. None can surpass some of Spenders insight into Gorky's creative process.A shortcomihg of this biography is the lack of color reproductions of the paintings.His choice of photos of the family of Gorky ,give us a glimpse of his background. The paper back (a catalogue ) "the breakthrough years /Arshile Gorky" would be a good companion book of this bio as it has ample repros and an essay by Spender among others ;Aupling for one.Herrara,Mattosian,Rosenberg,and other books on Gorky have fewer references to their books :in the Retrospective catalogue by the Philadelphia Museum of Art than Spender.Why? he raises questions about Gorky's work and life.On Gertrude Stein's deathbed she said to Alice B. Toklas,No alice it isn't the answers..its the Questions! I find that I refer to this book more than many of the other books on Gorky .I have 17 plus an old Arts issue dedicated to Gorky. Spencer wrote this book as his ideal reader would be the artist. Something I am grateful for his passion for landscape was renewed in Virginia. My favorite of the biographies written on Gorky. Herrara &Mattosian battle it out for academic prestige in the history of art.Herrara especially writes from a woman's point of view( too much on Gorky's love life.)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Armenian Modern, August 22, 2006

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Paperback)

Matthew Spender, son of poet Stephen, is a good writer who does a deft job of weaving his research into a lively story. But being the husband of Gorky's oldest daughter limits his interests to the "family" side of the artist's life: to hear Spender tell it, Gorky lived through three decades of New York's modern art revolution dreaming of butterchurns back in Armenia. He never really explains what drove Gorky to become an artist, let alone an abstract modern artist, in the face of family pressures, the trials of being an immigrant, and the burden he carried as a survivor of the Armenian genocide.

Gorky's idyllic memories of childhood clearly played a major role in his life and art, but so did Picasso and Cezanne, whose style he copied until the breakthrough near the end of his life. Spender plays down the endless hours Gorky spent in front of the canvas trying to insert himself into the history of Western art, preferring to read the artist's somewhat restricted interests (he steered clear of the tumultuous politics of Thirties New York, avoided bohemia, and refused to theorize about the inner sources of his art) as a gauge of how deeply Armenia held him. Maybe. But more attention to the exciting world his work unfolded in would have helped to explain Gorky's achievement a little more clearly. Hayden Herrera's more recent "Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work" may have replaced this biography and is probably the better place to turn for learning more about his life.