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ART AS EVIDENCE
Guardian
April 29, 2008 11:45 AM
UK
Arshile Gorky's moving double portrait is a testimony to the Armenian
suffering the Turkish government still deny
Record of a tragedy ... detail from Arshile Gorky's The Artist and
his Mother (1926 - 36)
The artist Arshile Gorky was a survivor of a genocide that officially
didn't happen. To this day, the government of Turkey denies that in
the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 to 1918, the Armenian
population of Turkey was deliberately eradicated. Yet there is ample
evidence of what happened. There are written eyewitness accounts,
there are photographs - and there is Gorky's painting The Artist and
his Mother (1926 - 36).
Can a painting be historical evidence? Can it "prove" something
happened?
Those who still deny the historical reality of the Armenian genocide
are capable of ignoring or explaining away photographs of emaciated
bodies in heaps, photographs that back up contemporary written
evidence that starvation was a key element in the pogrom. Armenian
men were shot dead in their tens of thousands. Women and children were
driven on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq without food or water,
in a herding intended to kill.
At least one million people were massacred.
Gorky's family were peasants who lived beside Lake Van. In 1915,
when he was 12, the Armenian ordeal began - for him a grim adventure
of siege, flight, and hunger. His mother Shushan died of malnutrition
in March 1918 after giving every scrap of bread to her children. Gorky
reached America in 1920 and went on to become a great artist, one of
the generation that created abstract expressionism. His two versions of
his memory picture The Artist and his Mother - one is in the Whitney
Museum in New York, the other in Washington's National Gallery -
are based on a photograph of the young Gorky with his mother.
If all other evidence of the fate of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 -
18 were to vanish, this moving image would endure as testimony to what
happened. You know, looking at it, that it records a tragedy. It is a
painting of distance and loss: the artist meditates on the distance
history has imposed between him and the place he came from, him
and the child he was. There's a dry hardness to the figures that's
at odds with his natural grace as a painter - it communicates his
sense of remoteness. His mother is frozen forever in his photographic
memory. You want to know the story: you find out about the painting
and discover the horrifying facts. The victims of this genocide still
haven't been properly acknowledged. But Gorky gave at least one of
them a face. How can the government of Turkey look Gorky's mother in
the eye and still deny the facts?
Guardian
April 29, 2008 11:45 AM
UK
Arshile Gorky's moving double portrait is a testimony to the Armenian
suffering the Turkish government still deny
Record of a tragedy ... detail from Arshile Gorky's The Artist and
his Mother (1926 - 36)
The artist Arshile Gorky was a survivor of a genocide that officially
didn't happen. To this day, the government of Turkey denies that in
the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 to 1918, the Armenian
population of Turkey was deliberately eradicated. Yet there is ample
evidence of what happened. There are written eyewitness accounts,
there are photographs - and there is Gorky's painting The Artist and
his Mother (1926 - 36).
Can a painting be historical evidence? Can it "prove" something
happened?
Those who still deny the historical reality of the Armenian genocide
are capable of ignoring or explaining away photographs of emaciated
bodies in heaps, photographs that back up contemporary written
evidence that starvation was a key element in the pogrom. Armenian
men were shot dead in their tens of thousands. Women and children were
driven on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq without food or water,
in a herding intended to kill.
At least one million people were massacred.
Gorky's family were peasants who lived beside Lake Van. In 1915,
when he was 12, the Armenian ordeal began - for him a grim adventure
of siege, flight, and hunger. His mother Shushan died of malnutrition
in March 1918 after giving every scrap of bread to her children. Gorky
reached America in 1920 and went on to become a great artist, one of
the generation that created abstract expressionism. His two versions of
his memory picture The Artist and his Mother - one is in the Whitney
Museum in New York, the other in Washington's National Gallery -
are based on a photograph of the young Gorky with his mother.
If all other evidence of the fate of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 -
18 were to vanish, this moving image would endure as testimony to what
happened. You know, looking at it, that it records a tragedy. It is a
painting of distance and loss: the artist meditates on the distance
history has imposed between him and the place he came from, him
and the child he was. There's a dry hardness to the figures that's
at odds with his natural grace as a painter - it communicates his
sense of remoteness. His mother is frozen forever in his photographic
memory. You want to know the story: you find out about the painting
and discover the horrifying facts. The victims of this genocide still
haven't been properly acknowledged. But Gorky gave at least one of
them a face. How can the government of Turkey look Gorky's mother in
the eye and still deny the facts?