Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide - traveling exhibition

Both portraits transfigure this photograph and, it seems clear to me, disclose a single psychological process: the experience of a survivor confronting the nightmare of his past. Critics and scholars have tended to analyze these pictures only in the most generalized and Eurocentric ways. They point out the mood of sadness and alienation, the influence of Picasso's blue period, formal debts to Cezanne. Even his dealer and close friend, Julien Levy, wrote in his book on Gorky that there is "no trace of his Near Eastern childhood" in his paintings until his final years.(26) Melvin Lader sees sadness in the pictures and suggests that they embody a universal symbol of the Virgin Mary and spiritual devotion to mother.(27) Harry Rand spends pages on these portraits describing nothing but formalistic detail, and his inability to see the bold historical and psychological realities of these portraits is encapsulated in his claim that the dramatic change of color-scheme from the first to the second portrait suggests "a simple, wholesome, scrubbed look, something dike Vermeer's interiors, although it may derive from early Cubism."(28)

It is hard to understand how the central event symbolized by these portraits--the Armenian Genocide--can continually go unnoticed. Given the autobiographical origins of the paintings and the photograph from Armenia which serves as their wellspring, one can only see these paintings fully by looking beyond the stylistic and technical influences of European painters.

In the first portrait, the two figures, constructed in single-point perspective, are composed of large planes of color. Mother and son are frontal and formal, imposing as they stare at us. It is worth noting that the iconography of Madonna and Child images in stone relief on Armenian churches and in manuscript and fresco painting had a central place in Gorkis imagination.

The dominant earth tones give the picture an organic quality; they also seem to situate the figures in a specific place and time. Grays and timbers, puce and yellow ocher evoke the clay and rock, mountains and wheat of Van. As in the photograph, the boy stands next to his mother, who is seated. In the background a gray wall and dark portico frame their heads. Before our eyes fully meet their faces, they are stopped by the hands of both figures. Except for the boy's right hand, which holds a flower, the hands have been expunged by white paint. In this picture, mother and son still seem to be in the land of the living, but the son seems to have an intimation of his orphanhood. Nearing 30, Gorky looked back to his eight-year-old self, at a moment of great crisis. The cut-off hands let us know that mother and child will never touch again, and because we know the events that ensued, we know that his mother, a victim of genocide, died of starvation in his arms. We might also recall that among the many methods of Turkish torture were bastinadoing (the slow, prolonged beating of the hands and feet with sticks or metal rods), tearing out of the fingernails and flesh from the hands, nailing of horseshoes to the feet, and nailing men and women to crosses.(29) It is probable that Gorky witnessed such torture in van and on his death march to the Russian border. Although other paintings of the period, such as Self Portrait (ca. 1937) and Portrait of Master Bill (ca. 1937) have hand erasures, the painterly effacements of these hands are, it seems to me, pointedly emblems of genocidal death, and the son with his one hand missing lets us know how close he, too, has come to such death.