The case of Arshile Gorky proves that originality doesn’t matter much. That is hardly surprising: imitation has regularly trumped innovation throughout the history of art; it would not have occurred to most medieval window-makers to do something that had never been done before. The 20th-century avant-garde shared a worship of originality, yet Gorky, one of its founding brothers, derived most of his style and imagery from fellow pioneers. To follow his career is to surf waves of indebtedness to Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, Matta and Tanguy. Their examples nourished and comforted him.

‘Organization’ (c1933-36)

The Armenian was born Vosdanik Adoian in an Ottoman village on the shores of Lake Van around 1904. During the Armenian genocide in 1915, the family was forced out of the region and the boy watched his mother die of starvation. In 1920, he made his way to the US, where his father had emigrated a decade earlier. But the teenager soon cut the relationship off, blaming his father for abandoning the family.

By 1925 he had adopted a colourful pseudonym and a mythic past. Arshile (or Arshele, as he spelled it then) is Russian for Achilles, and Maxim Gorky was a literary titan whom the artist claimed as a cousin – when he wasn’t declaring himself kin to a Georgian prince. An annual report for New York’s Grand Central School of Art, where he taught, conveyed that he had been born in Nizhny Novgorod and that he had graduated from that city’s art school before going on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. Gorky was scrupulous about acquiring prestige by association: he took Picasso’s birth date, October 25, as his own.

Gorky put his awful past and true ancestry behind him. From the start, the self-taught artist adopted a parade of father substitutes, men he never met but whose implicit guidance he abjectly accepted. He loved these strangers and he learnt to speak their languages with increasing eloquence.

The first was Cézanne. Fascinated by the Frenchman’s notorious perseverance in the face of failure, and inspired by his unique command of spatial relationships, Gorky copied his paintings from books and public collections. The first room of the show brims with Cézanne lookalikes, including a slightly surreal rendering of Staten Island as a suburb of Aix-en-Provence, with eucalyptus trees swaying between ochre roofs and limpid Mediterranean skies.

‘The Artist and His Mother’ (c1926-36)

By 1927, Gorky had switched allegiances. “I feel Picasso running through my fingertips,” he announced. The stark linearity of the Spaniard’s neo-classical period inspired “The Artist and his Mother”, Gorky’s tender, tragic self-portrait with the parent who perished in his arms. Fortunately, he had found himself a fantastically chameleonic role model, which allowed him to produce a broad range of tributes. “Organization”, for example, is an ambitious reaction to his idol’s surreal “Studio” of 1927-28. In it, Gorky mimics the stylistic quirks, the signature distortions, the grid-like structure and use of black lines to map out the composition. “If he drips, I drip,” Gorky supposedly declared.

As Picasso darted from synthetic cubism to linear classicism, Gorky sprinted right behind. If Picasso did Ingres, Gorky did Picasso doing Ingres. As Picasso dodged between abstraction and representation, Gorky descended into multiple personality disorder, channelling Picasso, Léger, Kandinsky, Miró and de Chirico all at once.

Gorky was a terrific draughtsman, though, with an imaginative eye and meticulous technique and, by the 1940s, the multi-mentored disciple had come into his own as the author of lavish symphonies of line and colour. “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb”, the masterpiece of Gorky’s maturity, vibrates with warbling crimsons, oranges and golds, its abstruse codes buried beneath layers of shimmering hues. “The Scent of Apricots on the Fields” (1944) remakes Cézanne in molten washes of citrus and mauve. Yet underlining those biomorphic swirls lay the strokes of Gorky’s vigorous pencil. He overlaid linear, even academic studies with opulent whorls of paint.

Gorky both invites and repels our efforts to understand his imagery. Curvaceous and fleshy, intermittently jittery and languorous, it implies specific meanings that we strain to decipher. But the work’s power springs precisely from its elusiveness.

‘The Liver is the Cock’s Comb’ (c1943)

Even at his creative peak, Gorky was still looking and learning from others. By the 1940s, it was the Surrealists, who arrived from Europe hauling a darker, spikier conception of life’s snares. Gorky’s joyful canvases began to brim with vampiric symbols of female sexuality and erotic horror. The Surrealist sensibility chimed with Gorky’s darkening temper. In January 1946, a studio fire destroyed a trove of his work. In March, he was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery. In June 1948, a car crash fractured his neck and left his painting arm temporary useless. Soon afterwards, his wife slept with his best friend. These events took their toll on his already fragile psyche. He hanged himself in 1948.

Gorky may have mined and even mimed the discoveries of his contemporaries, but he had his own singular flair. He could draw better than almost any of them and he had an unrivalled sense of colour. This retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art makes clear that style is merely a form of language, not its content. And just as Gorky adopted English, the language of his new home, he also adapted his colleagues’ techniques, using them to speak with his own inalienable passion.

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