ARSHILE GORKY KEY IDEAS
Many of Gorky's works reflect both the artist's traumatic past as a genocide survivor and the memory of the exquisite beauty of his early childhood surroundings in Armenia. Through the process of painting itself, Gorky could begin to resolve his largely tragic life by transforming real people and real objects, remembered or present, into new realities, abstracted and controlled.
Gorky pioneered the trend of naming his abstract compositions with titles directly referring to particular objects and places, thus fusing objective reality and subjective feeling in his works.
Gorky's work is particularly historical significant in that it provides the most important link between prewar European modern styles and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in America during the 1940s.