At the Armenian Museum of America, “Arshile Gorky: Redrawing Community and Connections” invites viewers to reflect on the artist’s humble beginnings as an immigrant in Watertown and his later evolution as a pioneer of American Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition, curated by Kim S. Theriault and on view through April 26, draws deeply on Gorky’s relationships and the ways in which he relied on family, friends, and surroundings to foster his artistic practice. Through twenty-seven works, including paintings, drawings, prints, and a musical documentary, viewers take a kaleidoscopic journey through the course of Gorky’s career, encountering the techniques, motifs, and compositions inspired by the cultural vanguard of his era that would define Gorky as a master of abstraction.
Along the Charles River, Watertown’s thriving manufacturing industry promised opportunity for immigrants and became a developed community for those fleeing the Armenian Genocide. In 1920, Arshile Gorky, still referred to by his birth name Vostanik Manoug Adoian, arrived in the US with his sister Vartoosh Mooradian and settled in Watertown, reconnecting with relatives. Straying from societal norms and the expectations of his family, Gorky was dissatisfied with factory work and wanted to pursue a career as an artist. He achieved his dream by enrolling in classes at the newly founded New England School of Art and studying the old masters at the Museums of Fine Arts, Boston. His earliest models included friends, family, and himself, as demonstrated in Self-Portrait (1923–24), an early surviving work painted in Watertown. The artist rendered himself in a subdued palette, emphasizing texture through thick, layered brushstrokes across his jacket and shirt collar, while sweeping, gestural marks articulate facial features such as the bridge of his nose. His averted gaze evokes a sense of introspection. From his formative stages, the artist demonstrated a technical command of the medium.
In 1924, during a period of reinvention, the artist shed his identity as an Armenian refugee, renaming himself after the Russian/Soviet writer Maxim Gorky and moving to New York City, determined to make his mark on America’s richest artistic hub. Throughout the ongoing process of self-fashioning, Gorky actively constructed a revised biography, at times claiming Russian and/or Georgian noble origins and formal training in Europe, creating distance from his Armenian heritage while situating himself within a more cosmopolitan artistic identity.
Gorky aligned himself with the most avant-garde movements available to him. His compositions evince a reverence for artists like Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne.Yet these references signal more than the influence of established figures. Although Gorky falsely claimed to have studied in Paris, his engagement with Cubism and abstraction reflects a deliberate effort to assert himself within a contemporary canon. Working in the United States, he familiarized himself with developments that had only recently emerged in Europe and were still gaining traction among a limited circle of forward-looking collectors. His knowledge and practice underscored both his ambition and tenacity.
In Still Life with Pitcher and Pears (c. 1926–27) the artist depicts an arrangement with an assortment of fruit and tableware with multiple perspectives—a technique popularized by Cézanne. In the tabletop scene Still Life with Pitcher (c. 1928–29), Gorky mimics Picasso’s later Cubist works, where representational objects are broken into fields of color and patterns, deconstructed across a tabletop. In this instance, a pitcher is divided by a black angular mark. It is partially abstracted in white to the right and rendered realistically in grey to the left. By absorbing and reworking these frameworks, Gorky developed a visual language that was not only informed by modernism, but actively participated in shaping its evolving trajectory.
As one traverses the exhibition space, it becomes difficult to ignore the music, laden with tension, playing in the distance. Nestled in an intimate screening room, the documentary created by Armenian American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian and Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, They Will Take My Island (2020), plays on repeat, featuring JACK Quartet and Silvana Quartet. This thirty-one-minute piece chronicles Gorky’s life as an Armenian immigrant through grief, displacement, and his formation as an artist. Gorky’s relationship with his mother, whom he lost to starvation in 1919, is central to the film, a photograph of the two of them during his youth appearing on screen recurring throughout. The artist would revisit her memory throughout his life as a source of inspiration.
In the somber black-and-white photograph, Gorky’s mother, Shushan Der Marderosian Adoian, sits dressed in a floral apron and a headscarf, gently closed fists resting in her lap. Dressed sharply, Gorky stands alongside her, holding a small bouquet of flowers. They both look beyond the frame with vacant stares. Intended to be sent to Gorky’s father in America along with a request for financial support, the photograph is a reminder of the family that is left waiting in Armenia. This photograph was the motivating force behind the painting The Artist and His Mother (c. 1926–c. 1936), one of Gorky’s most recognized masterworks, which exists in multiple versions now held by institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gorky repeatedly invoked his mother’s presence by drawing her image as seen in Study for Mother and Son (c. 1936), where her likeness is captured in densely worked graphite.
At the heart of the exhibition are the relationships that Gorky forged, reflected in the personal objects on view. In Portrait of De Hirsh Margules and Portrait of Blanche Margules (both c. 1937–38), ink on paper doily drawings with minimal mark-making, Gorky outlines the profiles of his artist friend and his wife. The simplicity of the composition implies that the works were executed with a sense of immediacy, as if responding directly to a moment of inspiration. The fragility of these objects makes the preservation of the materials so remarkable. It’s apparent that these works were deeply cherished. Gorky’s relationships with fellow artists emerged as a crucial force to both his working process and his sense of belonging.
Drawing, 4 P.M. (c. 1945–46) is a double-sided composition in graphite pencil and crayon on paper composed of biomorphic shapes and deliberate lines. Mounted for 360-degree viewing, it allows audiences a unique opportunity to engage with these rarely exhibited illustrations. Drastically different from his earlier works, here Gorky relied less on inspiration from painters who came before him and more on his immediate surroundings and memories, engaging with Surrealist ideas of autonomous drawing and dream imagery. Centrally placed in the room, these drawings are in dialogue with the other objects to pay homage to Gorky’s fully realized method of organic forms and flowing lines.
Gorky’s work demonstrates an aptitude for navigating the zeitgeist of his time; through synthesizing surrealist, abstract, and modernist frameworks, he formulates an approach that was increasingly his own. By tracing his artistic development alongside his personal history, “Arshile Gorky: Redrawing Community and Connections” situates Gorky as a progenitor of Abstract Expressionism. Comprising generous loans from the Armenian diaspora, the exhibition reinforces that Gorky’s work has been sustained not solely by institutions, but by individuals who chose to steward his place in art history
“Arshile Gorky: Redrawing Community and Connections” is on view through April 26, 2026, at the Armenian Museum of America, 65 Main Street, Watertown, MA.
