Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture by Peter Balakian

Author:Peter Balakian [Balakian, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226254470
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

8

Arshile Gorky: From the Armenian Genocide to the Avant-Garde

When my essay “Arshile Gorky and the Armenian Genocide” appeared in Art in America in 1996, there was a surprising absence in the scholarship on Gorky. Amid the quite considerable criticism and scholarship (although not yet one full, scholarly biography), Gorky’s Armenian historical and cultural context were largely missing. There was acknowledgment that Gorky had come from Van, a city in a province of the same name in eastern Turkey, part of historic Armenia, in what was sometimes referred to as “Turkish Armenia.” There was some mention of his mother’s death in tragic circumstances, and some general note that Gorky’s childhood was lived in an Armenian village and agrarian setting. But most of this so-called background was relegated to biographical detail or exotic backdrop. Scholars and critics noted that he was an exile, as were many of Gorky’s fellow painters—Willem de Kooning, John Graham, Mark Rothko, and Raoul Hague among them.

Yet the absence of any more deeply probed Armenian context and its possible implications for his work struck me as a lacuna, a missing piece in the attempt to understand Gorky’s art. I felt that, for all the explication and praise from critics, the paintings had been seen through a lens of dominantly formalist critique that belonged to an almost exclusively and more narrow aesthetic disposition of modernist art historical and critical practice. It would take another essay to summarize many of those mostly good critics and scholars and their opinions.

Although some critics, such as Melvin Lader and Ethel Schwabacher, were more attentive to the Armenian context of Gorky’s life and work, it wasn’t until Gorky’s nephew, Karlen Mooradian, in his self-published books of the late 1970s and early 1980s wrote about his uncle that the richness of the Armenian context emerged; and even if Mooradian was not able to bring that context into a way of viewing Gorky’s art very clearly or perceptively, at least he had pointed to something significant. Unfortunately, Mooradian’s eccentric, overwrought, and somewhat disjointed prose and his deeply private musings on his uncle, whom he deified, both shed light on and obscured Gorky’s past. This was further complicated by the swatch of letters that Mooradian unearthed and published—letters that Gorky had supposedly written to his sister Vartoosh. These letters were full of reflections on Armenian genocide trauma, Gorky’s childhood, and assertions about the supremacy of the Armenian aesthetic tradition and culture. They were full-bodied and lyrical, and because most of Gorky’s other letters were yet to be translated and were in archives, there was little to which to compare them. But decades later, Gorky scholars could not find the letters anywhere (Mooradian committed suicide in 1990) and came to the conclusion that Mooradian had constructed the letters either from interviews he had done with his mother about Gorky or from his own imagination. The letters were part of my original essay, but I excised them as soon as I discovered they were not able to be validated,

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