ARSHILE GORKY: NEW YORK CITY

In a period that saw Manhattan host the premiere of George Gershwin’s musical composition ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ and the construction of skyscrapers that define New York to this day, a young Armenian painter and refugee named Vosdanig Manuk Adoian moved to the city and gave himself a new name: Arshile Gorky. Hailed by some as the ‘last Surrealist’ or the ‘first Abstract Expressionist,’ the artist embarked on a journey of self-reinvention and aesthetic innovation that would parallel New York’s own transformation from an emerging city into a surging metropolis and a cultural epicenter.

This richly illustrated publication is the result of Hauser & Wirth’s ongoing close collaboration with the Arshile Gorky Foundation, which supplied many of the images and spearheaded the book’s chronology and maps. With numerous Gorky paintings, studies of his mural projects and works on paper alongside contemporaneous photographs of New York by Berenice Abbott and archival images of the artist, this publication brings the years after Gorky’s arrival in New York vividly to life.

Book photography of of Arshile Gorky: New York City (2025), Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and the Arshile Gorky Foundation

Edited and introduced by Ben Eastham, ‘Arshile Gorky: New York City’ features new scholarship by leading writers and art historians on Gorky’s Manhattan years. Christa Noel Robbins reflects on the relationship of the artist’s life and work as a ‘framing question’ that would come to define modernist painting in the United States. Emily Warner examines Gorky’s murals as ‘both part of and distinct from the urban fabric—a public art that pulses with its own, often fantastical, energies.’ Tamar Kharatishvili investigates the artist’s blending of fact and fiction via questions of identity and fraught ideas of ‘originality,’ while painter Allison Katz meditates on her early encounter with a work of Gorky’s and his enduring influence on her own artistic development. In the book’s final essay, Adam Gopnik reflects on the relationship of Gorky’s painting to time, place, and ‘personal truths.’

At the same time, ‘Arshile Gorky: New York City’ unpacks a relationship of mutual influence—Gorky would come to shape the history of New York painting, just as the city had shaped his own work. If Gorky is a great American painter, it is at least in part because—as Eastham writes—like New York City, he contains multitudes.

ARSHILE GORKY:

NEW YORK CITY

English

Paperback

24 x 17 cm; 244pp

978-3-907493-06-9

£32.00 / $38.00 / €35.00

Texts by Ben Eastham, Adam Gopnik, Allison Katz, Tamar Kharatishvili, Christa Noel Robbins, and Emily Warner

Global Release: 17 June 2025

Gorky giving a lecture during an exhibition of his drawings, Guild Art Gallery, New York, December 1935. © The Arshile Gorky Foundation. Photographer unknown

Artist biography

Arshile Gorky played a pivotal role in the shift to abstraction that transformed 20th-century American art, bridging surrealism and abstract expressionism. Gorky was born an ethnic Armenian in Khorkom, Van, Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) in ca. 1904. Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States in 1920. After four years with relatives in Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet Maxim Gorky. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of modernism.

About Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Publishing has been a cornerstone of Hauser & Wirth’s activity since 1992 and in keeping with the gallery’s artist-centric vision, Hauser & Wirth Publishers works to bring readers into the universe of artists and behind the scenes of their practices. From publishing artists’ writings and exceptional exhibition-related books to commissioning new scholarship and pursuing the highest levels of craft in design and bookmaking, Hauser & Wirth Publishers creates vital, lasting records of artists’ work and ideas, forging critical gateways to the cultural discourse they inspire. Across its dedicated bookstores in the U.S. and Europe, Hauser & Wirth Publishers complements and amplifies the artist’s voice by hosting a robust slate of special programs, including talks, panels, readings and learning initiatives that engage a variety of audiences and communities. Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ titles are distributed worldwide via Distributed Art Publishers, Interart and Buchhandlung Walther König.

For more information, please visit the Hauser & Wirth site. Also, follow the gallery on Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube for more updates on this artist.. For more information about this title and others with Hauser & Wirth Publishing, please visit their site here.

ARSHILE GORKY: NEW YORK CITY

Paulo Monteiro