SELF-MADE MAN.(biography of the artist Arshile Gorky)(Book Review)

A headline in the Times of July 22, 1948, read "gorky's cousin ends life." According to the brief obituary that followed, a Russian-born American painter, forty-five years old, had hanged himself in a barn on his property in Sherman, Connecticut. The story was full of errors. The painter, Arshile Gorky, was unrelated to the celebrated Communist writer Aleksey Peshkov, whose pen name was Maxim Gorky. He was probably forty-eight years old, and was born Vosdanig Adoian, in a village in Turkish Armenia. The Sherman property wasn't his--he was too poor to own much of anything--and the building that he selected to die in was a shed. The obit's major errors repeated lies that ...