'Gorky grew a shaggy moustache, beard and long hair, in 1928, when other men shaved clean, wore the thinnest moustaches and pomaded their hair flat. He had grown to a full six foot four, with a broad frame. His dark colouring and coal black eyes gave him the look of a smouldering hero of the silent movies. Proud of his physique, he invited men to punch his stomach when he was off his guard. It was hard as a board. 'He looked like Rasputin. A real Armenian!'

Arshile Gorky a great and neglected figure acknowledged to day as a pioneer of the new painting in New York the forties and fifties together with Rothko, De Kooning and Pollock. Among his debts as a painter are those to Cézanne, Picasso and if you'll allow him as a European, Kandinsky. And on that sketch alone the bridge between American modernism and European post-war is plain. However Gorky's origins were not in Europe but in Armenia. A place he was driven from after the Turkish Genocide of 1915 and his mother's death by starvation. Indelible events which shaped not only his art but his entire life, ended by suicide in 1948. And that's contributed to the mythology around him. A mixture of tragic glamour and black magic to some extent obscuring his achievement as a painter and his inspiration to his peers.

That from a young contemporary Lillian Olinsky, just one name in an address book which reads like an honour roll of 20th century culture, Breton, Duchamp, Miro, Leger De Kooning, Pollock and his pupil Mark Rothko.

'Gorky was head of the class, in charge of it. He taught, as well as saw to it that the students were on good behaviour. And he expected good performance. He was strict. Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but Gorky was overcharged with supervision... He always appeared dramatic... he was an intense, emotional man to whom art was rather like an obsession. But he was not at all hard to get along with, provided you had a serious concern about art. It was all fantastic and you couldn't believe what he told you , if you were a stranger. It was difficult to tell where reality ended and imagination began. He was always expounding on the unique beauties and poetry of the place of his birth. Always insisting that there was no place on earth exactly like Armenia.'

Rothko remembering his teacher. Well in spite of his impact, and an extraordinary life, he is relatively little known in this country despite a major show in the Whitechapel Gallery in 1990. In fact only one important work by him hangs in a British Gallery, or did until it went for conservation, his Waterfall of 1943 in the Tate Gallery. Scandalously France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Belgium have yet to see a major exhibition of his work. The appearance of a new biography is overdue. The Black Angel, A life of Arshile Gorky by Nouritza Matossian who joins me know with the art historian Michael Corris of Oxford Brooks University.

Nouritza Matossian first you describe him as a Black Angel. Black Angel, that is a key description . What were you trying to describe with it.

NM: When Gorky was a small boy, and he was then called Manoug Adoian, he was mute, almost for six years. His mother was desperate and she was a religious woman, she was descended from 37 generations of priests. She took him to church to pray and made many pilgrimages. She would stand him in front of the paintings and she prayed to God fervently that he would open his tongue. And Gorky had a memory of being left by his mother. When he had Leger to dinner in 1943, Leger asked him, 'Why did you begin painting. What made you being painting as a small boy?' Gorky told the story of standing before paintings and seeing white angels and black angels and thinking that he himself was a black angel and he wanted to give some of his goodness to the world even though he was a black angel. This is also an indication in a split within Gorky. He lived at a time when dark forces were haunting them, the massacre was about to be unleashed. He stood watching an eclipse in 1915 with his mother and his sister through darkened sooty bits of glass. Suddenly he saw the world going black, the trees and houses started disappearing and in the middle of the day it was night. From that day on the world went black for the Armenians.'

Richard Coles: That solar eclipse, that experience of darkness at noon, prefigured what was perhaps the most important and defining event in his life which was his survival of or perhaps not a survival in the long term, the Armenian massacre of 1915.

N.M: In 1915 he was in the city of Van which is the province of Vaspurakan where the Armenians were in the majority and the Armenians realised that they were about to be attacked by the Turkish Army. there was a siege which carried on for 40 days. Gorky was thirteen. A s a small boy he helped the fighters by carrying food and messages and actually dousing the smoking mortars with water to carry the bits of shells away so they could be made into new ammunition. Meanwhile in the rest of the country every single Armenian town and village, the Armenian men were being separated from their wives and families, rounded up and killed. The women and children being made to march out of towns across the country to deserts in Syria. So it was the total destruction of Armenian culture and the Armenian provinces.

RC: And the at the age of thirteen a highly impressionable age. Michael Corris. Do you think that shows the origins of a life and career which seem to be all about transition in a sense, all about moving from one culture to another. Gorky is described now as a kind of bridge figure, Someone who mediates between worlds. Is that the kind of right angle to take.

MC: I think so many of his colleagues of the New York School were involved in this kind of assimilation. First so many of them were emigres, exiles first generation immigrants, or provincials like Jackson Pollock fro Wyoming California. It seemed like that had first the task of integrating themselves in this American culture. Secondly they did have to integrate the lessons of American which for many of them because they were self-taught came almost all at once. So artists like Ingres, Chardin, Courbet, Manet, Picasso were all lumped together before their eyes, all had the same kind of importance, spectacularly great in their eyes. And yet there was this European tradition that they had to transcend, that they had to overturn in order to find what they thought was some sort of valuable as newly Americanised artists.

RC: Its curious in a way, Nouritza Matossian that Gorky is seen as somehow a bridge figure between those two traditions. Yet he was never in Europe. His career in art began in New York. Those European influences, where were they coming into his painting?

NM: You have to remember that he was 18 when he left Armenia. Bey that time he has absorbed the early illuminated manuscripts which he saw at this mother's knew, the Bibles, he had seen very fine architecture in the Van region, extraordinarily, . There is the church on Aghtamar, called Sourp Nishan . the facades of that church are like paintings made of stone. the y are completely carved with reliefs all the way around. He saw these things and he lived in an atmosphere and environment where there were beautiful carpets, textiles, silverwork. All of that is very important for the vocabulary of the artist. He also absorbed lot more in Armenia itself than we realise.

RC: Its very interesting that in one of the illustrations of the book , perhaps the most famous single painting of the Artist and his Mother, well there are two versions, one in the Whitney and one in the National Gallery of Washington. You reproduce next to it one of the reliefs from that church and instantly you see where so much which is distinctive about that painting comes from. Not from the kind of European tradition, there is a lot of Cézanne in it but from something that is distinctively Armenian.

MC: I think there is a tremendous tension not just suffered by Gorky but other artists as well where they couldn't simply negate their origins and yet in a search for their origins through the forms of representation given to them through European art Surrealism, synthetic Cubism before they somehow had to forge a kind of personal vocabulary at one and the same time had to be recognisable as valuable unique art. It was a very difficult problem. I am struck by the way a lot of critics have started to develop a kind of iconographic interpretation of Gorky in trying to come to terms with his Armenian heritage and yet we can identify with Gorky however there is no identity as such. Gorky searches through his origins but we don't have an original artist. As somebody says 'to be Gorky is to be someone else'.

NM: I don't agree with that at all. I take a completely different view. Breton when he said that Gorky was one of the most important painters in America understood and recognised the fact that Gorky was rooted in his own mythology, be it the folk literature, the music and the visual literature that he had absorbed. A lot of artists, Pollock adopted mythologies, there was a tremendous interest in primitive art which was not their own. Gorky didn't have to adopt anybody else's. he had his own and he was very confident with it.

MC: Not quite so. You could argue that Pollock's interest in Jungian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes stemmed form his own experience in psychoanalysis .There was of course this idea Someone has called it the modern man discourse. The attempt to get to the mythic character of modern consciousness.

RC: Isn't it true that the Armenian influences are easy to see in the kinds of representation in t he twenties I But after the twenties, the forties in particular where he is moving into abstraction and surrealism you're looking at a very deracinated kind of art in a way. How do you read the Armenianism if you like in that abstract work.

NM: When I was searching through Armenian art and trying to understand why Gorky had moved me so much when I first saw him. I felt that he was deeply Armenian and I couldn't put my finger on it I went to the British Museums and I looked at some Bibles and illuminated manuscripts. I bought some slides and brought them home. I projected them on the wall and I turned them out of focus. Suddenly the whole narrative of the picture with the virgin Mary and the landscapes, animals, turned into a Gorky when it was out of focus, the colours, the shapes, the embedding of colours one inside the other which is a very strong Gorky characteristic in the mid-forties, all of th at was there. It seemed to me that this was a child who had these memories and they had been smashed and he was recapturing them in an abstract way.

RC: That's very interesting isn't it Michael Corris , because looking at the plates reproduced what you see as an abstraction is not always a very helpful word because you are pulled into these pictures and your eye is tugged around them in a way.

MC: Yes I think they're incredibly centrifugal , the forms float , there is an incredible intensity of light , they're quite airy and things are almost in flight. I think abstraction is quite a misleading term here, Gorky was developing a system of representation, the code he was using is not the kind that links a natural object, one that we can look at in an hermetic way with a system of representation which is something else. Whether or not i was based entirely on the perception or memory of these illuminated manuscripts I would just say that throughout his working life, he took apart he dissected them and he reconnected them together and this working method would have a similar effect.

RC: How do you evaluate the claims made for Gorky as a pioneer in particular as a central figure to what later happened in the forties and fifties in the New York Art World.

MC: I think he was central because he worked through a lot of these traditions Cézanne, synthetic cubism of Picasso , the abstract biomorphi c abstraction of Miro , Surrealism and Matta towards the end of his life. To this extent he was quite like his peers and this is very important, there was this collectivity ,this collective responsibility to come to grips with these resources of expression. So, in that case I think he was a quite important figure and an influential one.

RC: Is it the fate of someone who is a notable influence Nouritza Matossian, to in fact be obscured by that in a sense. He has never received the credit and attention he deserves because he is seen as an adjunct to other painters or a prefigurer of other painters.

NM: I think he was obscured because he died very young. He committed suicide in 1948. The others went on to paint and to exhibit for decades afterwards and of course their work was noticed and exhibited and discussed far more. Another reason he's obscured is because of his false identity, if you like, his assumed identity. No one really came to grips with who Gorky really was? What his background was?

RC: Okay you can correct all those things by reading the book. thank very much Michael Corris and Nouritza Matossian. Black Angel A Life of Arshile Gorky is published by Chatto and Windus at £25 pounds. Visitors to New York can catch an exhibition of Gorky's paintings and drawings at the Gagosian Gallery until the 9th January. And Waterfall will be rehung at the Tate Gallery on Monday.