Rachel Campbell-Johnson on the tormented mind of the visionary Armenian painter Arshile Gorky

In 1928, when many men wore pencil moustaches and pomaded hair, Arshile Gorky was wandering the streets of New York unshaven. His sister quizzed him gently about his appearance. "I wanted to paint myself as Christ, with long hair and a beard," he replied. "When I finish it's going to be one of the best portraits in New York."

this is just one anecdote recounted in passing in a biography so richly researched that every chapter brings a cluster of such stories. But what this particular tale introduces is Gorky's sense of dedication to a higher cause: " The torments of my mind impel to me to recognise that I must have been born to suffer for art," he later wrote to his sister. His 1947 painting Agony - body broken parts and roughly reassembled from disparate components - speaks powerfully of it's painter's Christ-like sense of estrangement and transfiguration. Gorky, said his closest friend, was a "classical example of a tragic hero, the one who is crucified."

From the moment of his arrival in Armenia, a moody Armenian immigrant, his threadbare jacket marked with a cross of chalk, to his final days when, with his neck fractured in a car crash, he lay in traction " like Christ in crucifixion", the symbol of the cross shadowed Gorky's life. In his early forties, abandoned by his Bostonian wife and humiliated by cancer, he slashed his last canvas with a knife before removing his neck brace and hanging himself. His already broken spine snapped easily.

Arshile Gorky is one of those painters - like Soutine or Van Gogh - whose life was at least as passionate as his art. The two were utterly integrated. And this is what Nouritza Matossian brings out best in Black Angel, the first major biography of Gorky, published to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.

Matossian's portrayal of the artistic development and influence of a painter remembered by art history as the link between European Surrealist painters and the Abstract Expressionist movement in America is thoroughly researched. But where her particular talent lies is in her perception that the key to Gorky's work rests in Armenian history, in the origins of a man born Manoug Adoian in a village on the shores of Lake Van, reared amid the Turkish genocide of his people, suffering famine and exile before finally reaching America at the age of 17. Gorky's' entire oeuvre sprang from these roots. His lifelong obsession with his mother, his constant attempts to recapture her spirit and essence in paint, speak of a visceral yearning to come to terms with his past.

Armenian herself, Matossian has a deep emotional affinity with her subject. She is the first of his biographers who speaks and reads his language and, through meetings with his sister the only surviving person to have shared his childhood), she exposes deliberate misinformations and breaks new ground.

Perhaps the stricter scholar might find her under-critical and over-dramatic (she has a tendency to invent direct speech). But less rigorous readers will be swept along by a compulsive narrative and charmed to find something so like a love affair between biographer and subject revealed. One is almost unsurprised to find, when turning to the author's photograph on the back of the flap of the dust-jacket, that Matossian bears a striking resemblance to the lost mother with whom Gorky felt such a profound connection.

BLACK ANGEL A Life of Arshile Gorky by Nouritza Matossian, Chatto & Windus, £25 ISBN 0 70115363 6