By Hayden Herrera

Herrera -- author of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo" "Mary Frank" and "Matisse: A Portrait" -- tackles the life of troubled Armenian artist Arshile Gorkey in her newest acclaimed biography.

Born in Turkey around 1900 Vosdanik Adoian (who would later use the pseudonym Arshile Gorky) escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. He arrived in America in 1920 and found work as an art teacher in Boston then New York.

By the 1940sGorky developed a style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. Called "the most important painter in American history" Gorky's masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters who came of age after World War II.

After a series of personal set backs and losses the troubled Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Herrera's biography is a sympathetic sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy. The result of more than three decades of scholarship