National Gardening Day: Arshile Gorky

In 1986, President Reagan established National Garden Week, which was first celebrated in 1987 from 12 through 16 April. In 2002 the National Gardening Association insisted that the entire month of April should be National Garden Month. National Gardening Day was established in 2018 by the Cool Springs Press generally to celebrate gardening, but also to stress both the physical and emotional benefits of encouraging people to get outside and commune with nature.

National Gardening Day, 14 April: Art by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948, United States, born Armenia)

Arshile Gorky was a pioneering painter in the development of Abstract Expressionism.

Arshile Gorky, Garden at Sochi, ca. 1943. Oil on canvas, 78.7 x 99.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (MOMA-P2009gorars)

Garden at Sochi is the third in a series of three paintings of the same title. The underlying theme of the works was his father’s garden in Armenia. The garden held special memories for Gorky, because it had contained a poplar tree planted at Gorky’s birth and lovingly cared for by him. Stylistically the influence of the shapes from Miró’s paintings is obvious, although Gorky’s work has a much thicker build-up of paint (“impasto”). The tightly controlled line contrasting with the fluidly applied paint -- although in different types of forms -- are seen in the biomorphic abstractions of William Baziotes (1912–1963, United States).

Up until World War II (1939–1945), American art of the 1900s had been dominated by realism of various types. The migration of many European modernists to New York in the decade before the war created a fertile environment for American artists interested in abstraction. The majority of these European artists were Surrealists and non-objective abstractionists. Out of this fertile environment emerged the so-called New York School, also called Abstract Expressionism. It was the first modernist art movement that evolved in the United States.

Abstract Expressionism is generally separated into two styles, action painting and color field. Action painting involves energetic brushstroke, organic forms, loosely applied paint, and often thick surface build-up. Action painting is the vein of Abstract Expressionism most closely associated with Surrealism in the ideas of spontaneous or automatic expression based on the subconscious.

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) was a German artist whose modernism was influenced by French, rather than German tendencies before World War II. In the 1930s he was invited to teach in America and transmitted the abstract vocabulary of Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism to his American pupils. This heavily impacted the artists who would become Abstract Expressionists. Many of them were Hofmann students in Ptown, including Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) and Arshile Gorky (1904–1948). The explosive energy in the United States after victory in World War II excited the rapid development of the style.

Gorky came from the city of Van, in eastern Armenia. His mother was from a line of priests of the Armenian Apostolic church and instilled in him a love for Armenian history, art, and traditional culture. The manuscripts, sculpture, architecture and wall carvings of the old city inspired an early interest in art. Fleeing the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I (1914–1918), Gorky migrated to America, arriving in 1920. His memories of the art and beautiful surroundings of his homeland influenced his painting throughout his life.

After studying art in Boston for two years, Gorky moved to New York where he had further studies. In New York, he met the Ukrainian-born British abstract realist John Graham (1886–1961), an artist who kept many of the Abstract Expressionists abreast of modernism in Paris. Between the mid-1920s and late 1930s, Gorky drew influences from many of the then-current French modernists. His figural style of the late 1920a and early 1930s was similar to Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), while his abstractions of the late 1930s show the influence of Picasso (1881–1973) and Miró (1893–1983), transmitted through Hofmann.

Despite his debt to European modernists, a recognizably personal abstract style emerged for Gorky in the early 1940s. It was a combination of the biomorphic shapes of Miró, and the slashing, expressionistic shapes of other Abstract Expressionists. Among his colleagues in the New York School, Gorky was unique in his fusion of mysterious objects within a recognizably defined space. In 1945, André Breton (1896–1966), the self-appointed leader of the French Surrealists, took an interest in Gorky's works and got him a one-person show in a New York gallery.

Correlations to Davis programs: Explorations in Art 1E, 3rd Grade, Unit 2.7 -- Imagine That, Line Types