From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky - Hardcover

Himself a sculptor as well as writer, Spender recounts the life of Armenian-born abstract painter Gorky (1904-48), who was at the center of the New York art scene from the 1920s to the 1940s. He describes the influence of his childhood and headstrong mother, his determination to be a painter, his protean personality, his growing reputation, and the stresses that led him to take his own life. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

y, one of the most intriguing figures in modern art, was at the center of the New York art world in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Yet he was never fully recognized as an important painter in his lifetime, and it was only after his death that his reputation soared. In this deeply felt and penetrating biography, Matthew Spender--himself a sculptor and the husband of Gorky's elder daughter--writes with extraordinary sympathy and perception, and he gets to the heart of his elusive subject.

Born in Khorkom, a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky grew up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood: the scars of the 1896 Turkish massacres of his people; then the mass slaughter of 1915 from which his own family fled; the desertion of his father; the dominance of his headstrong and loving mother, who died of starvation after they found shelter in the Caucasus.

Making his way to the United States, the young Gorky determined against