other artists

• Ana Mendieta
• Francis Bacon
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Alexander Calder
• Willem de Kooning
• Jean Dubuffet
• Alberto Giacometti
• Henri Matisse
• Henry Moore
• Gerhard Richter
• Auguste Rodin
• Ed Ruscha
• David Smith
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Nikki Lee
• Man Ray
• John Baldessari

in depth: Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) was one of the most influential members of the post-war New York School as well as one of its most eccentric. He first arrived in American in 1920 after fleeing his native Turkish Armenia to avoid conscription in the Turkish army.

In 1925, he moved from Massachusetts to New York City, where he adopted his Russian pseudonym and became an art teacher first at the Grand Central School of Art, despite being an almost totally self-taught artist. He quickly became something of a celebrity in the New York world, as much for his striking appearance and strange mannerisms as for his artistic techniques and ideas.   

His early work included several abstract murals, including one for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Painting on this large scale gave Gorky the confidence to work with increasingly bigger canvases, which in turn influenced other Abstract Expressionist painters to experiment with a larger format as well. Also central to the development of his style was his close study and emulation of the modern masters of painting, including Kandinsky (who he often claimed had been his teacher), Picasso, and Miro.

Gorky was a skilled draftsman, and although his mature works have the appearance of the paintings of an artist who embraced the automatic, unplanned approach to art-making that was popular at the time, he always prepared his compositions with extensive, carefully planned sketches.

There are twenty-four drawings and prints by the artist in the Hirshhorn’s collection.