The Arshile Gorky Foundation initiated a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Arshile Gorky’s paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and textile in December 2006, based on Robert Goldwater's and Jim M. Jordan's The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue (1982), and Melvin P. Lader's research for a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works on paper, begun 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 so as to provide a thorough, accurate, and authoritative description and history of every known work made by Arshile Gorky from 1924 through 1948, the year of his death.
The Arshile Gorky Foundation is pleased to announce that the inaugural installment of the digital Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné is now available free of charge. With this premiere 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—many of which have never before been published. 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.
To access the Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné, which is available free of charge upon email registration, follow the link: www.gorkycatalogue.org
If you own a work by Arshile Gorky and have not been contacted by the Foundation, we continue to review submissions. Please visit the Artwork Submissions page for more details.