Composition II - A drawing of a man riding a horse next to a woman

Arshile Gorky Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) was an American painter of Armenian descent who played a crucial role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Originally named Vosdanig Adoian, Gorky was born in 1904 in a small village on the eastern border of the Ottoman Empire. Gorky was only a teenager when the Ottoman forces began the ethnic cleansing of the Armenian people. Even though Gorky and his family survived the Armenian genocide, his mother died of malnourishment shortly after. In 1920, Gorky immigrated with his sister to the United States. Little is known about his early years there, but the young man was determined to reinvent himself. He changed his name to Arshile Gorky, playing the role of a Russian noble and claiming to be a relative of the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky (which was impossible because Maxim Gorky was a pseudonym used by the writer Alexei Peshkov).