Return to Top Works Homepage


ARSHILE GORKY
(American, born Armenia, 1904-1948)
Woman with Necklace (Studio version), 1936
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 1/8”
Bequest of George and Susan Proskauer 1992.17.18

Born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, Arshile Gorky—as he was known after about 1925—emigrated to the United States in 1920 to escape the Turkish and Soviet persecution of Armenians. He studied first at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York City, where he attended both the National Academy of Design, and the Grand Central School of Art, where he later taught. His deep admiration for Pablo Picasso inspired his own lyrically—and often biomorphic—abstracted paintings of the 1930s. In Woman with Necklace, which depicts Gorky’s younger sister Vartoosh, the artist enhanced the pale blues and yellows with thick black outlines surrounding the chalky flesh tones of his model’s features and her dark, asymmetrical eyes, which stare out from the canvas with melancholy sadness. It is one of the last—and indeed one of few—portraits painted by Gorky, and it presages Gorky’s mature work. Characterized by a fusion of childhood memories, Surrealist imagery, and vivid dashes of color, his late creations helped launch a new experimentation in American art, and they proved to be a crucial influence in the evolution of Abstract Expressionism.