Agony (1947) © 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Looking back on his early years in New York, Willem de Kooning often spoke of an encounter that proved crucial to his life as a painter. “I was lucky enough when I came to this country,” he told Harold Rosenberg, “to meet the three smartest guys on the scene: [Arshile] Gorky, Stuart Davis and John Graham.” De Kooning dubbed this unlikely trio—two rather exotic immigrants and one irreducibly American native son, bound together by their commitment to adventurous art—“The Three Musketeers” and joined them as a kind of d’Artagnan.

Each of the Musketeers was significant to the eager young Dutchman’s evolution as an artist, but the most important of the three was the prodigiously talented Gorky, de Kooning’s near contemporary but a far more sophisticated modernist, sure of his convictions and apparently ready to lecture anyone about art, at any time. Although largely self-taught—he had one semester of drawing classes before becoming a drawing instructor himself—Gorky was deeply informed about the art of the past, the recent past, and the present. De Kooning always acknowledged his debt to Gorky, cryptically giving the address of Gorky’s studio on Union Square as the place he “came from.”

Gorky looms large not only in de Kooning’s recollections of the formative years of Abstract Expressionism but also in most other accounts of New York of