Abstract
SummaryThe artist Arshile Gorky played a central role in the development of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s. Born in Armenia, his early figurative works recall a childhood of persecution by Ottoman Turks, a period during which he suffered a number of significant losses. The painting The Artist and His Mother (c. 1926–1936) is based on a photograph showing the 7-year-old Gorky with his mother, 7 years before she starved to death during the Armenian Genocide. This article explores the early experiences that haunt this painting and the difficulties Gorky struggled with during his adult life as an immigrant to the USA – factors that contribute to an understanding of his suicide in 1948.
Highlights
In the surviving 1912 black-and-white image (Fig. 1) the woman wears a long floral dress and neat headscarf. Her son stands stiffly beside her in his formal coat, usually reserved for church. Whatever she wished to communicate to her absent husband, she received no response
Seven years later she died of starvation while fleeing Turkish persecution and was buried in a mass grave
The hopelessness of his situation, prompted her teenage son to escape to the USA
Summary
This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Figures 1 and 2 fall outwith this license.
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