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Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide - traveling exhibition
Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Peter Balakian
On the occasion of a traveling exhibition of Arshile Gorky's work of the 1940s, the author argues that Gorky's childhood experiences of persecution and exile are crucial to an understanding of his paintings.
We are but a slice of our homeland 's soul, tossed afar from it by foul storms. Vartoosh, dear, I dream of it always and it is as if some ancient Armenian essence within me moves my hand to create so far from our homeland the shapes of nature we loved in the gardens, wheatfields and orchards of our Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we lost and which I shall repossess in my art.... I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush for all the world to see.
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--Arshile Gorky, in a letter to his sister
Part One
Another marvelous show of Arshile Gorky's paintings is touring the country. It opened last May at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., moved to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo in October and is now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth until March 17. "Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years" features many of Gorky's most impressive paintings and drawings from the 1940s, beginning with the seminal Garden in Sochi (1941) and including most of the canonical paintings of his great period such as Waterfall, How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, One Year The Milkweed, Agony and The Plow and The Song, as well as some extraordinary paintings that are less well-known--Golden Brown, Summer Snow, Soft Night and Cornfield of Health, II, to name a few.
The show is accompanied by a beautifully produced catalogue which includes substantial essays by the curator Michael Auping, Dore Ashton and Matthew Spender, who is married to Gorky's eldest daughter, Maro. (Both Spender, son of the late British poet Stephen Spender, and Maro Gorky are painters.) Following the essays is a selection of letters Gorky wrote to his beloved sister, Vartoosh, between 1939 and 1947. In one of them, dated Nov. 24, 1940, Gorky writes:
As Armenians of Van.... We lived and experienced it. The blood of our people at the hands of the Turks, the massacres.... Our death march, our relatives and dearest friends dying . . . before our eyes. The loss of our homes, the destruction of our country by the Turks, Mother's starvation in my arms. Vartoosh dear, my heart sinks now in even discussing it.(1)
Reading that letter on page 80 of the catalogue, after 77 pages of commentary by Ashton, Auping and Spender, I am deeply perplexed about why, in those 77 pages, there is not once an articulate, historically coherent statement about the Armenian Genocide--the event which most profoundly shaped Gorky's life. It seems strange that even in the 1990s, scholars and critics do not write about Gorky's art and life within the necessary context of the Armenian Genocide. The 1915 extermination of Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government was the century's first genocide and a landmark in modern history. By 1918 it resulted in the death of over one million Armenians and the exile of close to a million more, thus exterminating or deporting the entire Armenian population from what had been its Anatolian homeland for 3,000 years. The then United States ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, wrote about the tragedy in his 1919 memoir: "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."(2)
The Genocide was reported regularly with bold headlines in the New York Times and has been well documented by eyewitness accounts, photographs, numerous survivor narratives, official state records and diplomatic reports from the United States, England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Greece; and by now there have been eight decades of historical study from scholars around the world. For Americans growing up in the decades following 1915, the phrase "the starving Armenians" was a familiar saying.
Most of Gorky's early critics would have known that phrase and had some sense of the horror that lay behind it. Nonetheless, one can understand, if not excuse, the absence of any discourse about Gorky as an Armenian Genocide survivor in the earliest criticism of his work. For much of the postwar period, critics were confined by the narrow parameters of formalist and influence-oriented criticism that we associate with modernism and its long aftermath. Even so, it seems bizarre that Gorky scholarship has been so consistently devoid of any discussion of the Armenian Genocide. From Gorky's earliest commentators such as Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Julien Levy, to later critics and scholars such as Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose and Ethel K. Schwabacher, and more recently Diane Waldman, Harry Rand and Melvin Lader, there is not one who has noted, much less fully described, what happened in Armenia in 1915. Consequently no critics or scholars have considered the impact of the Genocide on Gorky's art. At most, some critics have cited his Armenian childhood in passing as a biographical detail or an exotic curiosity.
