Art
The earliest example of the Armenian genocide in art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event. [3]
The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, are considered to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period. [4] In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. His two The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a photograph with his mother taken in Van.
A case study of Gorky's 1946-7 painting The Plough and the Song, reveals central themes of suffering and loss, starvation and hunger, and cultural nostalgia emerge through his biomorphic and organically curvilinear forms representing fertility and nature. [5] Through warm, earthy colors, he paints from memory the fertile agricultural lands of his Armenian homeland. He reconstructs a new hybridized identity in America, an amalgam of visual cultural practice of modern art of the West and wistfulness for the rich culture of the Armenian people, reflected in his paintings. The Plough and the Song materialize the dialectic of violence and culture in the fractured history of the Armenian people.
Scholars on Gorky agree that the suffering and loss he experienced during the Armenian genocide strongly informed the production of his modernist paintings in America. Comparisons of Gorky's The Plough and the Song (1946-7) with works of his contemporaries in the field of organic biomorphic abstraction reveal the stark manifestation of his experiences of brutality and horror. Gorky appears to have systematically developed the imagery of the canvas such that many of his biomorphic forms appear to be “bleeding,” alluding to the horrors and violence he witnessed during the Armenian genocide. He depicts red far more fluidly, yet systematically. Several of his forms appear to be “bleeding,” given the semblance of a trail of blood that streams down from the inflicted “wounds” on the biomorphic forms. Gorky makes liberal use of shading to deliberately draw attention to the fact that these ebbing blots and streams of red are, in fact, bleeding wounds. Yet, the ironic truth in the way Gorky seems to weld his nostalgia for Armenian culture and rich heritage with the violent history of genocide in a single compositional frame ultimately reflects many Armenians’ own views of their fractured history. There exists a constant dialectic of culture and barbarism in the history of Armenians, where violence persists a theme as constant as the beauty of its culture and its people.
Upon coming to America in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, Gorky reconstructed a new identity for himself, as he changed his name from Vosdanig Manoug Adoian to Arshile Gorky, a name that harkened to Georgian-Russian aristocracy and literati of the Caucasus region. In 1922, he enrolled at the New School of Design in Boston, a city, which at that time, was home to a large immigrant population of Armenian Americans. When he later moved to New York, where he taught at the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art, Gorky was thrown into the briskly evolving realm of modern art. As he began to experiment, his early works began to reflect stylistic elements of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. [6] In her book, Black Angel: The Life of Archile Gorky, Armenian scholar Nouritza Matossian likens seminal influences on Gorky's work and style, including Egyptian funerary art for a pose, Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color, and to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness. These eclectic attributes that seeped into Gorky's paintings show the struggle he endured to become recognized by drawing influence from other great masters. [7]
Through the Westernization of Armenian painting, Gorky was able to communicate his worldview: his memories of the fertile, natural beauty of an idyllic agricultural lifestyle in Armenia, a beauty ruptured by the horrors of bloodshed and violence inflicted by the Armenian genocide on his people. His symbolic depictions of bleeding female fertility against a backdrop of chaos communicate his artistic worldview of how the Late Ottoman Empire ravaged a multi-ethnic empire clean of ethno-linguistic and religious diversity. The dialectic of beauty and violence is one that frames his worldview on representations of genocide through Westernized Armenian painting.
Contemporary Armenian-American artist Mher Khachatryan (b.1983) has produced a series of works to raise awareness of the Armenian genocide. [8]
