something better
the pain of knowing
you'll never see the
love of your life
again
not because of death
but because she found
something better
there is no alcohol
potent enough to fill
that hole
burn all the memories
you can
it will change nothing
always remember men
much worse than you
were brave enough to
go chase that dream
or die trying
even more were brave
enough to put their own
life in their own hands
and say enough
Agony -- Arshile Gorky
Vostanik Manoug Adoian was 11 when his family fled from Armenia into Russia in order to escape the Turkish Armenian genocide. When he was 16 he emigrated to the US and, claiming to be an Armenian noble, changed his name to Arshile Gorky, pretended to be a cousin of the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, and began painting. In 1933 he became one of the first artists employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, a federal program designed to provide work to unemployed painters. In 1941 he married Agnes Magruder, the daughter of an admiral, and during the 1940s his work evolved from his early Impressionism to Surrealism (his “The Liver is the Cock's Comb” was featured in the last Surrealist exhibit in Paris in 1947) and prefigured Abstract Expressionism. But from 1946 he faced a series of crises: his studio burned down, he underwent a colonoscopy, he had a car accident which resulted in a broken neck and a temporary paralysis of his painting arm, and “Mougouch” (his wife) left him with their two children in the wake of an affair with the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, another New York Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist. “Agony” was Gorky’s last painting before he hanged himself at 44 in 1948. He wrote, “The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.”
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