Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky

[Փոքրիկ Իշխան]

I was wondering if any of you have read this book? It was written by Nouritza Matossian, an Armenian-Cypriot woman living in the UK. I have never read Gorky's full biography save for online articles. It seems this woman's biography of him is considered definitive. Opinions, anyone?

Here's the website: http://www.nouritza.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

[bell-the-cat]

It is considered "definitive" by its author - which, alas, is not quite the same thing as it actually being definitive.

The more recent "Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work" by Hayden Herrera is far better if you want to read a book which accurately talks about his art and his life in America. However the various and varied books about Gorky's life should all be studied since the man himself was self-invented, and much of the literature about him is equally invented.

[Փոքրիկ Իշխան]

It is considered "definitive" by its author

Lol, not a fan of her?

[bell-the-cat]

Lol, not a fan of her?

The book is all right and is worth reading, it's just not quite as important or well written as its author would lead you to think, she is rather too much a self-publicist.
The most important content in it is her exposure of Gorky's letters as fakes, which, given that before this they were unquestioningly accepted as genuine, makes all the books about Gorky written in the 1970s and 80s fit only for the dustbin. Though, I can't see how anyone reading them could ever have believed they were genuine.
One author, Mathew Spender, wrote a book (Arshile Gorky and the Genesis of Abstraction) about Gorky's art, based mostly on their content. Six years later he wrote another book about Gorky, after the letters had been exposed as fakes - in it he never admits that he had been fooled and the whole content of his earlier book is rendered obsolete. In the newer book (From A High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky) he only mentions the letters once, and all he says is that the "translations of Gorky’s letters are untrustworthy".

A study of everything that has been written about Gorky would be useful because afterwords it makes you suspicious and sceptical about anything written by so-called "experts" in their fields, especially if they are art experts.

[Joseph]

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/04/art_as_evidence.html

Art as evidence

Arshile Gorky's moving double portrait is a testimony to the Armenian suffering the Turkish government still deny
April 29, 2008 11:45 AM

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?