Arshile Gorky: an Old World newly minted

I doubt the name Arshile Gorky will spring to mind when you think of the great American Modernists. Art history tends to make a broad leap from the most fêted figures of turn-of-the-century Paris to the monumental abstractions of such postwar American pioneers as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Gorky gets missed out, treated at best like some explanatory stepping stone, at worst like the guest who turns up at the party to discover that he hasn’t been given a place. It’s at least 20 years since a show of his work was brought to Britain, and although Tate Modern’s 1943 Waterfall, a gushing tumble of mossy greens and shining yellows, is enough to whet any appetite, you have probably seldom