About the ARSHILE GORKY CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ

This digital publication of the catalogue raisonné of Arshile Gorky’s paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and textile, initiated by the Arshile Gorky Foundation in December 2006, is informed by over five decades of research. With this inaugural launch, the catalogue is not yet exhaustive, but it does provide the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative documentation on nearly two thousand known works created by Gorky dating from 1924 through 1948, the year of the artist’s death. It is an ongoing project that will continue to be produced, published, and maintained under the auspices of the Arshile Gorky Foundation. Future installments will be published upon the completion of our continuing research and the photography of the additional known works. As new information on the published works becomes known and/or available to us, the catalogue’s digital format allows us to update and date-stamp existing entries. Our intent in making the presently completed entries available now is to provide the scholarly community and the art world in general with new and reliable research, accompanied, in almost all cases, by high-resolution images. Further, in providing this information as an online catalogue raisonné, it allows us to make the publication freely available to anyone and from any location. Our hope is that the work of Arshile Gorky may reach a broader audience and inspire new scholarship. 

The foundation of this digital catalogue raisonné rests upon several successive campaigns of research and direct examination of Gorky’s work. Groundwork for the first catalogue raisonné of Gorky’s paintings began in the late 1960s and resulted in Jim M. Jordan’s The Paintings of Arshile Gorky, A Critical Catalogue, published in 1982. Melvin P. Lader embarked on a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings in the early 1990s. His research was left incomplete with his untimely death in 2005, after which his research papers were acquired by the then newly formed Arshile Gorky Foundation. Melissa Kerr, Managing Director of the Foundation until 2017, was engaged to continue Lader's catalogue raisonné initiative. In 2018, under the direction of Eileen Costello, a newly formed project team set out to update, advance, and supplement the existing documentation. We also tracked down a great many works for fresh examination and new photography. The present entries provide an authoritative description and history of the individual works and chart the development, sources, and context of Gorky’s artistic practice.

For information about Gorky's biography, including a detailed chronology of the artist's life, please visit the Arshile Gorky Foundation website.

Senior Editor

Eileen Costello

Managing Editor and Contributor

Parker Field

Researchers and Project Assistants

Julia May Boddewyn
Anna McCormick-Goodhart

With contributions by

Melissa Kerr
Melvin P. Lader
Matthew Spender

And assistance from

Wendy Amer-Hirsch
Chelsea Cooksey
Ethan Graham-Horowitz
Catherine Ingrams
Sophia Ma

Database and Site Design

panOpticon: Roger Shepherd and Susannah Shepherd
with assistance from exhibit-E