Matthew Spender, son of poet Stephen, is a good writer who does a deft job of weaving his research into a lively story. But being the husband of Gorky's oldest daughter limits his interests to the "family" side of the artist's life: to hear Spender tell it, Gorky lived through three decades of New York's modern art revolution dreaming of butterchurns back in Armenia. He never really explains what drove Gorky to become an artist, let alone an abstract modern artist, in the face of family pressures, the trials of being an immigrant, and the burden he carried as a survivor of the Armenian genocide.
Gorky's idyllic memories of childhood clearly played a major role in his life and art, but so did Picasso and Cezanne, whose style he copied until the breakthrough near the end of his life. Spender plays down the endless hours Gorky spent in front of the canvas trying to insert himself into the history of Western art, preferring to read the artist's somewhat restricted interests (he steered clear of the tumultuous politics of Thirties New York, avoided bohemia, and refused to theorize about the inner sources of his art) as a gauge of how deeply Armenia held him. Maybe. But more attention to the exciting world his work unfolded in would have helped to explain Gorky's achievement a little more clearly. Hayden Herrera's more recent "Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work" may have replaced this biography and is probably the better place to turn for learning more about his life.
