Arshile Gorky and the Armenian genocide - traveling exhibition

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Peter Balakian

Gorky was born Vostanig Adoian on Apr. 15, 1904, in the Armenian province of Van (pronounced vahn) in eastern Anatolia, then ruled by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. He was 11 in 1915, when the Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, announced his official plan to exterminate the Armenian population of Turkey. A 1916 telegram from Talaat to a provincial governor reads: "It was first communicated to you that the Government, by order of the Jemiat had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey.... An end must be put to their existence however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples."(8)

It should come as no surprise that Adolf Hitler saw in the Turkish extermination of the Armenians a paradigm for his final solution for the Jews of Europe. Only 22 years later, as he was preparing to invade Poland, Hitler remarked to his military advisors, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"(9)

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century, Turkey lost the Balkan states it had ruled for centuries. This was accompanied by mounting debt and political corruption. Turkey's leaders, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1878-1908) and the Committee of Union and Progress, known as the Young Turk government (1908-1918) led by the Pashas Talaat, Enver and Djemal, found a convenient scapegoat in the Armenians. By 1908, the Young Turks were promoting a fanatical, racist nationalism under the banner of pan-Turkism, a central tenet of which was racial purity for Turkey.

As "infidels," Armenians were relegated to outsider status. They were subject to an unjustly heavy tax burden and were deprived of legal rights in the Turkish courts. Banned from government employment, they turned to professional and commercial vocations. Widespread Armenian success in these areas, coupled with their long-standing educational traditions and ties to European culture and progressive thought, further widened the gulf between Armenians and Turks. The existence of a wealthy, educated, Christian Armenian minority was a constant source of social resentment on the part of the Turks. As the intensifying racism of the 1890s made conditions worse for Armenians, they formed political parties in order to seek civil rights and social reform. In this climate, the Sultan and the Young Turks found it easy to use the disproportionate wealth and education of the Armenian minority and the new Armenian reform movements as further pretexts for promoting race hatred. As the Nazis would do after them, the Young Turks implemented their final solution behind the screen of a world war.

Like many Armenian men of the period, Gorky's father had emigrated to America, in 1908, to escape the threat of conscription in the Turkish army. To be a Christian in the Sultan's army meant that one was likely to be mistreated, or even tortured and killed, by one's fellow soldiers. Thus on the eve of the Genocide, Gorky's mother, Shushanik, and her four children found themselves in an especially vulnerable position. By early 1915, the fanatical anti-Armenian provincial governor of Van, Djevdet Bey, the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha, had instituted a reign of terror. On Apr. 19, 1915, he issued a chilling order throughout the province of Van: "The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protect a Christian, first, his house shall be burnt; then the Christian killed before his eyes, then his family and himself."