Arshile Gorky (/ˈɑːrʃiːl ˈɡɔːrki/ AR-sheel GOR-kee; born Vostanik Manoug Adoian, Armenian: Ոստանիկ Մանուկ Ատոյեան; April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948) was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism.

[1] Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century.

Vostanik Adoian was born in the village of Khorgom (today's Dilkaya), situated on the shores of Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire[2] (modern-day Turkey).

[8] In 1923, Gorky enrolled in the recently founded New England School of Art in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor.

This later came to include such artists as Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera and Mark Rothko.

In 1935, Gorky signed a three-year contract with the Guild Art Gallery (37 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York).

The painting has been likened to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness, to Egyptian funerary art for pose, to Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color.

The canvas Portrait of Master Bill appears to depict Gorky's friend, Willem de Kooning.

[20] Michael Auping, a curator at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, saw in the work a "taut sexual drama" combined with nostalgic allusions to Gorky's Armenian past.

"[22] Artist Corinne Michelle West was Gorky's muse and probably his lover, although she refused to marry him when he proposed several times.

[24] From 1946, Gorky suffered a series of crises: his studio barn burned down (destroying his library and thirty of his paintings);[25] he underwent a colostomy for cancer; Mougouch had an affair with Roberto Matta.

In 1948, Gorky's neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident, and his wife left him, taking their children with her.

[29] The painterly spontaneity of mature works like The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944), One Year the Milkweed (1944), and The Betrothal II (1947) immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence.

[34] His oeuvre synthesizes Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary.

In October 2009, the foundation relaunched its website to provide accurate information on the artist, including a biography, bibliography, exhibition history, and list of archival sources.

After the town's People's Democracy Party administration was replaced by government appointees the water supply to the fountain was cut off, the taps were broken off, and signs with Gorky's biography in four languages – Armenian, Kurdish, English and Turkish – were removed from the monument.

[46] In October 2023 a potential work by Gorky, partially covered in white household paint by the artist himself, was the subject of an episode in the BBC art history series Fake or Fortune?