Achilles the Bitter: Gorky and the Genocide

Abstract

What trace do genocide and exile from the homeland leave on an artist's aesthetic language? Given the previous century's history, it would seem a fundamental question, especially for an artist such as Arshile Gorky, a survivor of the first modern genocide of 1915. How did this experience – too deep to be expunged by any subsequent biographical events – shape Gorky's art? Should we look to iconography (to the allusive symbolic content of Gorky's shapes) or to history (a devotion to remembered forms and to re-established ties with an interrupted past)? Do such forms play a compensatory, restorative function, a search for a lost wholeness and unity, as suggested by more than one of the authors reviewed here?1 Does trauma reveal its trace in an aesthetic preference for a certain palette with its emotive associations, as Peter Balakian argued eloquently in one of the first articles (1996) to deal with the impact of the Armenian genocide on Gorky?2 Or is it located in the search for a substitute form of authority in the wake of one's own tragically aborted patrimony? Gorky's legendary apprenticeship to older artists would suggest as much.