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  • Art As Evidence

    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?
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