Trivia

Pioneer of abstract expressionism and favorite painter of Mikhail Vartanov who shot films on his other 2 favorite Armenian painters: Carzou in 1984 and Minas in 1989 but not the Gorky film, as of yet.

Father of painter Maro Gorky & Natasha Gorky.

In 2015 a fountain monument commemorating Gorky was erected in Edremit, a town near his birthplace. 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.

Fifteen of Gorky's paintings and drawings were destroyed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in 1962.

On July 21, 1948, after telling a neighbor and one of his students that he was going to kill himself, Gorky was found hanged in his barn studio. On a nearby wooden crate he had written "Goodbye My Loveds".

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

He had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism.

Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. 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.

The suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian genocide had crucial influence at Gorky's development as an artist.

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