Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide - traveling exhibition

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Peter Balakian

So, for critics to ascribe this image to the open-ended experimentalism of modernism is to miss the central point. These handless figures are more than post-Cubist or Surrealist-influenced forms; they are images of torture, symbols of mass murder. With his living hand the son offers his mother a pink flower, a token of commemoration. The sallow side of his face is lost in inward grief, and the almond-shaped eyes are sunken with sorrow.

The son's tilted head and hairline lead us to his mother, whose eyes bulge like black cherries beneath the lids that hood them. The dignified solidity of her form can't mask her fatigue and worry; her pursed lips hold a quiver of defiance. She is still the force of will, shielding her boy in the face of catastrophe.

In the second portrait, mother and son no longer confront us with their massive foreground stances. They seem less accessible now. They don't greet us, and consequently we must enter their space. It makes sense, I think, to see the two portraits as sequential, as parts of an unfolding narrative. If they could be reunited from their respective museums--the Whitney in New York and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.--they would surely make a powerful diptych. While the paintings were begun and finished at different times, from 1929 to 1936 Gorky worked on them simultaneously and the similarities of the pictures dramatize Gorkis obsessive need to wrestle with the genocidal tragedy of his life. Yet if we view them side by side, the congruencies between them are less obvious and the differences more haunting.

The colors shock us into this recognition. Her head is mannered and abstract. The chalky blue-green of her face is a death mask. Those once-defiant eyes are now glazed as if they are looking into nothingness. The grim red line of her mouth could have been drawn by a mortician. What was once a massive white apron is now flesh color shaded red, an image of blood. The ambiguous white cloth of resistance and purity of the first portrait is now a garment of violence and death.

Many meanings coalesce in the mother's lap of blood: menses, womb, placenta, omphalos--the red abyss at the world's center, or a survivor's tom place of origin. From the edge of her apron, a violet hue spreads to the picture's perimeter. Violet is a color that was used frequently in Armenia in the illumination of manuscripts and the coloring of mosaics, frescoes and textiles. (In a letter, Gorky recalled "the medieval Armenian manuscript paintings with their . . . subtle colors, their tender lines and the calligraphy."(30)) One wonders if Gorky is using the violet to suggest some redemptive meaning or simply reminding us of what has been expunged by violence?

More red--burnished and menacing--appears in the background, as if blood were staining the world. Red also fills the window behind mother and son. With its undertones of raw umber and burnt sienna, this particular red evokes the lost world of Van--its rocky highlands and plateaus, the masonry of houses, stone churches and crosses. With his grayish-white arm, the son brushes against his mother. The arm hangs from his body as if lifeless, chalky like his mother's face. The dead arm is more than a son's grief; it is also her death in him. He, too, is streaked with red, so that he looks scalded by blood. One can't help recalling Grunewald's crucified Christ of the Isenheim Altarpiece, whose green flesh blisters with blood. Like Grunewald, Gorky uses paint to evoke the pathology of suffering.