MUSEUMS often get calls from people claiming to have treasure in their attics, valuable paintings created by great masters. These often turn out to be false alarms, but in 2004, when a woman called the Philadelphia Museum of Art about an Arshile Gorky under her rafters, it turned out to be the key painting in a collection, and one that would lead to a major exhibition, the biggest since the artists’ retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1981.

   The caller’s father, an architect, just happened to have been a roommate of Gorky’s in New York in the 1920s. He acquired “Woman with Palette” before Gorky (1902-1948) had achieved recognition as one of the last great Surrealist painters and a forerunner to Abstract Expressionism. PMA Curator of Modern Art Michael Taylor could identify the painting because of a related study, and it filled a gap in the museum’s collection.

   Although he lived less than half a century and experienced a barn fire that destroyed many of his paintings, Gorky left behind a prodigious body of work. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting the first major retrospective of his work in more than 25 years through Jan. 10, 2010.

   Born in an Armenian province of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky lived through the Armenian Genocide, witnessing the ethnic cleansing of his people, the minority Armenians, by Turkish troops. After the family fled with other refugees, the 17-year-old artist watched his mother die of starvation in his arms. This was to have a profound effect on his life and work. The focus of the PMA exhibit is on Gorky’s Armenian heritage, and the impact of the genocide.

   Born Vosdanig Adoian, he changed his name when immigrating, with his sister, to the Boston area to reunite with their father. He chose his new name in honor of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who himself adopted the pseudonym to reflect his desire to tell the bitter truth.

   With little means but great ambition, Gorky set out to educate himself. He visited museums and galleries and was a voracious reader. Just as Paul Cezanne had educated himself by studying the work of artists he carefully observed in the Louvre, Gorky “apprenticed” himself to Cezanne, systematically studying and copying his work. And just as Cezanne had been a rule breaker, Gorky, too, went ahead to break with tradition.

   From his Cezanne period, Gorky went on to Cubism, emulating Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Juan Gris, immersing himself in European Modernism. Ultimately he worked his way through the biomorphic designs of Jean Arp and Joan Miro, developing his own imprint.

   ”He came to this country in 1920 with no education, having fought against the Turks since 1915, lived in a refugee camp and had no sense of what art is, and within four years of his arrival he was teaching art in New York City and Boston,” says Mr. Taylor.

   The art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that Gorky was “a lifelong student, an intellectual to the roots.”

   In fact, Gorky could tell a tall tale: In addition to claiming to be a cousin of Maxim Gorky, he told people he’d studied with Kandinsky in Paris. “He could pull it off because he was such an adept artist,” says Mr. Taylor.

   When Gorky saw Giorgio de Chirico’s 1914 painting “The Fatal Temple” (on view in this exhibit), he was inspired to create a series of more than 80 drawings and two paintings, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia. “De Chirico’s painting is about an artist and his mother,” says Mr. Taylor, “and with its suggestion of the mother-son relationship it must have resonated with Gorky” who, by this time, had begun two large canvases on the theme of the artist and his mother. Exhibited here side-by-side, the two paintings titled “The Artist and His Mother” were based on a photograph of Gorky and his mother, taken in 1912 and sent to his father to remind him of his family back home. Gorky’s father had moved to Boston to elude being drafted into the Turkish army.

   As with many survivors of genocide, Gorky did not discuss his experiences of having to leave his home and travel more than 100 miles, only to see his mother die. The paintings were a place where he could work out these feelings.

   Gorky reworked these canvases many times during the ‘30s and ‘40s, perhaps as a way to hold on to his mother’s memory and his love for her, according to Mr. Taylor.

   With a studio in Union Square, N.Y., Gorky was able to support himself as a painter by creating murals for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Before then, “he couldn’t afford paints and canvas, so his drawings have the feeling of worked up paintings,” says Mr. Taylor.

   His first mural came out of the ink studies for Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, but this was rejected, perhaps too edgy for the WPA and the post offices where the murals would hang.

   In 1936 he received a commission to create 10 murals for Newark Airport Administration Building on the theme of aviation. He worked on them from his Union Square studio because “he didn’t think murals should be painted on the wall, where it would be subsumed into the architecture,” says Mr. Taylor. Gorky painted the murals on canvas that would be installed on the walls.

   The machinist style owes a debt to Fernand Leger. “But the murals were only on view a short time,” says Mr. Taylor. “During World War II, the airport became a military base and the murals were covered over and forgotten. The airport was expanded into an important hub and the old administration building was turned into a post office, where the murals were covered with 14 coats of paint.”

   All that paint probably protected them, adds Mr. Taylor.

   In 1972, a worker removed an exit sign and pulled a nail that had red paint and canvas on it, and the murals were discovered. Only two survived — the remaining eight had been destroyed — and both can be seen at PMA, where they have been restored.

   If the murals had been painted on the walls, instead of canvas, they might not have survived, according to Mr. Taylor. “This is the largest painting he ever made.”

   With the income he received from the WPA, Gorky worked on some of his most important paintings, such as “Organization.” “This is one of his most austere, coming out of Picasso and Mondrian... with a kind of Dada humor that gets lost in the final painting,” says Mr. Taylor, pointing to the accompanying drawings.

   Whereas Gorky’s paintings from the ‘30s are worked up in thick layers of paint, with a single canvas weighing as much as 90 pounds, the works from the ‘40s are thinned out with turpentine for more ethereal washes. In the ‘40s, Gorky became consumed with what Mr. Taylor describes as the urban milieu of Cubism, with cafes and collages of newspapers, glasses of wine and rum. By 1943, with the painting “Waterfall,” Gorky started to find his own voice. He was thinning the paint, dripping it, abstract but with a reference to nature. “It was a real breakthrough, as if a weight were lifted,” says Mr. Taylor.

   He went with his new wife, Agnes Magruder, whom he called “Magouch,” an Armenian term of endearment, to her parents’ farm in Virginia. The rich farmland and bucolic atmosphere of rural Virginia reminded him of his father’s farm in Armenia and inspired him to make abstract drawings in the grass. The observations from nature held memories of his childhood.

   ”These are the most lyrical he ever made, and led to paintings in the following year. They are filled with images of fecundity — he was the father of a young baby — and he was enjoying himself with the flora and fauna and bugs, but there’s also a sense of Armenia. He saw in the fields his father’s farm.

   ”He would bring them back to the farm to show Agnes,” continues Mr. Taylor. “She said he was like a fisherman going out and coming back every day.” (Mr. Taylor conducted five years of interviews with the artist’s 88-year-old widow.)

   Agnes was his wife and source of immediate feedback, and it was the first time he enjoyed the comfort and security of a loving relationship since his childhood, but they were only together for seven years. The last years of Gorky’s life were deeply tragic, starting with a studio fire in 1946 that destroyed 27 recent paintings, then a painful operation for colon cancer and a lengthy recuperation.

   From the ashes of his suffering he created the Charred Beloved series — he called his paintings “beloved.”

   ”They are very haunting, with their charred sooty backgrounds,” says Mr. Taylor. “The worst thing for an artist is to see his paintings destroyed — no artist should have to endure that.”

   Images of fecundity and eroticism turned to beasts, spiky and jagged. “There’s a tragic undertone to everything he’s expressing,” says Mr. Taylor.

   An automobile accident in 1948 left Gorky with a broken neck and paralyzed his painting arm. Then Agnes left him to have an affair with his friend and mentor. A broken heart was more than he could endure, and a few weeks later, Gorky committed suicide.

   ”In his short life, he changed the history of art,” says Mr. Taylor. “The hardest thing for an artist to do is to translate feelings into art, and he was brilliant at doing that. He changed the way painting looked in the ‘40s and opened the door to Expressionism.”

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  Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, Philadelphia, though Jan. 10, 2010. Museum hours: Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission costs $16, $14 seniors, $12 students, ages 13-18. Members and children under 12 free. 215-763-8100; www.philamuseum.org