Many of the leading American modernists came from abroad. Mark Rothko was born in Latvia, which was Russian territory at the time; John Graham was also Russian by birth, and Willem de Kooning was Dutch. Frederick Kiesler was Austrian, Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers were German and Arshile Gorky came from Armenia. His close friend Isamu Noguchi, half Japanese, though born in California, was raised in Japan. And Gorky’s former studio mate Hans Burkhardt was Swiss. Gorky and Burkhardt first met in 1927, when the latter, who had immigrated to the United States in 1924, enrolled in Gorky’s class at the Grand Central School of Art in New York.

Gorky was born Vosdanik Adoian in 1904 to a family of poor farmers in Armenia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I, during the Turkish genocide of Armenians, his family escaped, and during their flight his mother died of starvation. Adoian managed to get to Tiflis and from there, via Greece, to the United States, where he arrived in 1920. Seeking to mold his image in this newly discovered modern world, he fabricated a new identity and named himself Arshile Gorky, claiming a relationship to Maxim Gorky, the great Russian literary figure.

He attended Boston’s New School of Design between 1922 and 1924, and in 1924 became an instructor there. In 1925 Gorky was an assistant instructor at the New School of Design in New York, where Mark Rothko was one of his students. Rothko remembered that art for Gorky was "the single greatest source of happiness" and "rather like an obsession." At that time Gorky copied the Old Masters and taught their techniques. He would discourse on Uccello, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, color reproductions of whose works were hanging on his studio walls.

It was modernism, however, that was most important to him. He had to assimilate modern art. In 1925 he was painting Impressionist landscapes and then works in the manner of Cézanne, whom he once called "the greatest artist that ever lived." Next, he had to absorb Picasso and Cubism, telling a fellow artist, "I feel Picasso running in my fingertips," and painting a series of Synthetic Cubist still lifes that transformed Picasso’s shapes into his own more organic ones with thicker pigments.

By 1930 Joan Miró’s biomorphic abstraction became important to him, as did Wassily Kandinsky’s spontaneous fluid abstractions, which he saw at the Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Guggenheim Museum). The eminent art historian Meyer Schapiro remarked that Gorky’s career "was remarkable as a development from what seemed like servile imitation of other painters to a high originality."

Gorky was the link between modernist European art and American Abstract Expressionism. But he not only prefigured what was to come, he also created art that prompted the critic Peter Schjeldahl to write, "For the greatest American artist of the first half of the 20th century, I nominate Arshile Gorky." The forthcoming Gorky retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will allow us to reassess his work. This is also the time to focus on the productive association between him and Burkhardt, who was first his student and then his friend and colleague, a painter with whom he shared his studio for nine years that were critical for both artists.

Burkhardt first encountered Gorky when the Armenian was still searching for his own style. The two immigrants had many things in common. They were born in the same year. Both their fathers had immigrated to America, leaving behind their infant sons. After Burkhardt’s mother died when he was 6, he was brought up in an appalling Dickensian orphanage in Basel. Like Gorky, he followed his father to America, arriving in New York in 1924, where he first worked in a high-style furniture factory. In 1925–26 he took his first classes in commercial art at Cooper Union. A year later he enrolled at the Grand Central School of Art, where Gorky was teaching. Gorky quickly recognized Burkhardt’s talent, awarding him a prize for drawing and shortly thereafter, in 1928, inviting Burkhardt to his studio to study with him privately. Burkhardt remembered Gorky as being "like a wild man, bursting through class. So much energy ... He was teaching me how to see and think for myself ... He really opened my eyes to abstraction."