There's a moving anecdote about halfway through "Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky," Nouritza Matossian's fine biography of the New York School painter, that neatly encapsulates both the travails of his early life and the role that art came to play in it, as well as telling us something important about the power of images.

In the early 1930s, after working on a double portrait of himself as a young boy with his deceased mother for nearly a decade, he decided it was ready to be shown to his sister, Vartoosh.

"Confident of his expertise at last," writes the author, "he painted in answer to a strong inner need. His homage to his mother was bound to take on a sacred quality. Gorky's experience as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide is at the root of its spiritual power and explains its captivating poignancy. It had been his goal for years. He saved her from oblivion, snatching her at last out of the pile of corpses to place her on a pedestal. He atoned for abandoning his name by recreating her as a goddess.

"In Armenia relatives frequently sculpt crosses for their loved ones; graveside feasts are held on the Day of the Dead. To be buried in an unmarked grave is the worst fate. Gorky built his monument to her. . . . She is the lost homeland retrieved, the resplendent Armenian earth and stone. Fearful of losing his childhood and his identity, he placed himself next to his mother and he painted her back to life.

"Vartoosh described to the author how Gorky warned her before letting her see it for the first time. Then he sat her down, facing the portrait in his churchlike studio, and said, 'Vartoosh dear, here is Mother. I am going to leave you alone with her.' He shut the door.

"'Oh, I was so shocked! Mother was alive in the room with me. I told her everything and I wept and wept.'"

Most biographies of modern artists begin with several chapters detailing their subjects' arduous struggle to earn acceptance - not to mention a living - against the opposition of their family and the ridicule of the critics. Gorky might have welcomed such a pleasant start in life if it had meant trading in the one he actually had. About the only thing he had in common with other modernists (indeed, with other artists of any period) was an early disposition toward art. He began whittling pieces of wood into drawing tools before he was 10. In every other respect, however, a more harrowing beginning can scarcely be imagined.

Gorky was not his real name. He was born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian in Dzov, Armenia in 1904. His father left the family for America in order to avoid conscription into World War I, taking one of his daughters with him. Soon after they found themselves refugees, as the Turkish government began its deportation and slaughter of Armenians living in the Caucasus region, over a half a million of whom were killed.

Gorky's family first fled to the fortified town of Van but had to flee again when it was destroyed by the Turks after a lengthy siege. Conditions were appalling for the thousands who clogged the roads and mountain pathways leading toward what they hoped would be freedom and security. There was no food or water, nowhere to sleep. Transportation was whatever you had provided, which in the case of Gorky's family was nothing. They travelled on foot.

Worn out, ill and starving (the flour that needed to be mixed with earth in order to extend its supply had long ago run out), Gorky's mother died in front of her children on the very day her other daughter, in America, was being married. She was buried in an unmarked grave, along with dozens of others who had perished at the same time. Ironically, a check from their father, which their mother had been counting on to bring the family a measure of relief, arrived a day or two later. Gorky was 15.

Orphaned and alone, the two children managed to get themselves on a ship to New York and from there to Watertown, Mass., where his father had settled. This was not a happy reunion - too much time had passed since Gorky had last seen him, and in any event he was not an especially warm individual.

But by that time Gorky had committed himself to the world of art. As is clear from his painting of his mother, this was to be the means by which he came to terms with his past and made a place for himself in the present. He visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, omnivorously devouring its collections and being particularly taken, in those early years, with the Impressionists and the work of John Singer Sargent. In the mid-1920s he moved to New York where he took lessons at the Grand Central School of Art.

Such were his abilities that he was soon elevated to the status of teacher where he acquired a reputation as a tireless advocate of drawing as the basis of everything in painting.

It was in New York that he changed his name to Arshile Gorky. Personal identity was to be a major leitmotif in the artist's life. Changing his name was a way of remaking himself, severing contact with those parts of his past he found painful or distasteful, while retaining some link to his origins. Thus "Arshile" was a sophisticated replacement for the quintessentially American "Archie," an early pseudonym selected because its first syllable "Ar" was the same as that of Armenia. "Gorky" was the Russian revolutionary writer who had helped the Armenian Relief Organization.

He embarked on a protracted period of apprenticeship in which he threw himself into the work of a particular modern artist or style until he had mastered it, then moved on to another. Cezanne . . . Cubism . . . Kandinsky . . . Surrealism - one followed the other. The book makes clear that this was not so much pastiche or fakery but determined autodidacticism that resulted, as fakery cannot, in authentic originality and personal expression.

For proof, consider that the young Willem de Kooning and Jacob Kainen, among others, were strongly attracted to Gorky's work as an example of intense study of works of art and equally intense self-criticism. Had Gorky been any kind of charlatan, the first people to have known it would have been his fellow artists.

By the 1940s he had evolved a distinctive style that combined something of the Surrealists' biomorphic imagery, a delicate draughtsmanly line and broad washes of color. As the art historian Harry Rand proved in the early 1980s, Gorky's painting only appeared to be abstract. It was a highly subjective, coded form of representation. Nonetheless Gorky, who was enjoying growing recognition, had an important formative influence on de Kooning, JacksonPollock and the other painters who would come to form the Abstract Expressionist movement.

It is perhaps inevitable that anyone with as fragile and contingent a sense of self should have few inner resources to cope with anything that would undermine that arduously constructed sense of personal identity. So it was with Gorky. The last few years of his life were marked by a succession of personal catastrophes that no amount of professional success or recognition could compensate for. In 1946, a studio fire destroyed a large number of paintings and drawings, he was diagnosed with cancer, and his marriage collapsed, all in rapid succession. Depressed and demoralized, he committed suicide in 1948.

Nouritza Matossian, an Armenian author and music critic living in England, has written a solid, well-researched biography of Gorky that is happily lacking in the sentimentality that could so easily infect a tale. She is a bit too matter-of-fact about what it was like to be an avant-garde artist in New York between the Depression and World War II. Her narrative unfolds with a cinematic inevitability, as if opportunities for artists to exhibit and sell their work - not to mention actually create it - were in as abundant supply then as they are today. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

But not surprisingly given her background, she more than makes up for this in delineating the continuing role Gorky's Armenian roots played in shaping his life and art. Indeed, she weaves an intriguing biographical tapestry that deftly reveals the nexus of identity, creativity and personal history of a man for whom art served as a lifeline but for whom in the end even that was not enough to keep him going.

Eric Gibson is the deputy editor of the Leisure and Arts page of the Wall Street Journal.