Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide - traveling exhibition

On the occasion of a traveling exhibition of Arshile Gorky's work of the 1940 the author argues that Gorky's childhood experiences of persecution and exile are crucial to an understanding of his paintings.

We are on the contrary a slice of our homeland 's inner man tossed afar from it by means of foul storms. Vartoosh, dear, I dream of it always and it is as if a certain quantity of ancient Armenian essence within me impels my hand to create with equal reason far from our homeland the shapes of nature we lov in the gardens, wheatfields and orchards of our Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we missing and which I shall reposses in my art.... I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush for all the world to see

--Arshile Gorky, in a alphabetic character to his sister

Part One

Another marvelous present to view of Arshile Gorky's paintings is touring the political division It opened last May at the National Gallery in Washington, DC mov to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo in October and is now at the late Art Museum of Fort Worth until March 17 "Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years" features many of Gorky's greatest in quantity impressive paintings and drawings from the 1940 beginning with the seminal Garden in Sochi (1941) and including greatest in quantity of the canonical paintings of his great period similar as Waterfall, How My Mother's Embroidered Apron unrolls in My Life, One Year The Milkweed, Agony and The Plow and The ditty as well as some extraordinary paintings that are les well-known--Golden Brown Summer Snow, yielding Night and Cornfield of Health, II, to name a few

The exhibit is accompanied by a beautifully produc catalogue which includes substantial essays by dint of the curator Michael Auping, Dore Ashton and Matthew Spender who is married to Gorky's oldest daughter, Maro. (Both Spender, son of the late British author of poems Stephen Spender, and Maro Gorky are painters.) Following the essays is a selection of alphabetic characters Gorky wrote to his beloved sister, Vartoosh, between 1939 and 1947 In individual of them, dated Nov. 24 1940 Gorky writes:

As Armenians of Van.... We lived and experienced it. The life-current of our people at the hands of the ottomans the massacres.... Our death march, our relatives and dearest friends dying . . before our organ of sights The loss of our abodes the destruction of our region by the Turks, Mother's starvation in my arms. Vartoosh dear, my heart sinks now in plane discussing it.(1)

Reading that alphabetic character on page 80 of the catalogue, after 77 pages of commentary by dint of Ashton, Auping and Spender, I am to [i]or[/i] at a great depth perplexed about why, in those 77 pages, there is not one time an articulate, historically coherent statement about the Armenian Genocide--the incident which most profoundly shaped Gorky's life. It have the appearances strange that even in the 1990 scholars and critics do not write about Gorky's art and life within the necessary adjoining matter of the Armenian Genocide. The 1915 extermination of Armenians by means of the Ottoman Turkish government was the century's first genocide and a landmark in new history. By 1918 it followed in the death of above one million Armenians and the exile of shut up to a million more, thus exterminating or deporting the entire Armenian population from what had been its Anatolian homeland for 3000 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 of that kind horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past look almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915"(2)

The Genocide was reported regularly with stout-hearted headlines in the New York Times and has been well documented through 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 the agency of now there have been eight decades of historical close attention 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 more [i]or[/i] less sense of the horror that lay behind it. Nonetheless, single 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 a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the postwar period, critics were confined by dint of the narrow parameters of formalist and influence-oriented criticism that we associate with modernism and its lengthy aftermath. Even so, it have the appearances bizarre that Gorky scholarship has been in the way that consistently devoid of any discussion of the Armenian Genocide. From Gorky's earliest commentators similar as Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Julien call together to later critics and scholars similar as Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose and Ethel K Schwabacher, and more not long ago Diane Waldman, Harry Rand and Melvin Lader, there is not single who has noted, much les to the full described, what happened in Armenia in 1915 Consequently no critics or scholars have considered the impact of the Genocide upon Gorky's art. At most, a certain number of critics have cited his Armenian childhood in passing as a biographical detail or an exotic curiosity.