Arshile Gorky was born in 1904, the son of Setrag and Shushan Adoian, in the Ottoman Empire's easternmost and largely Armenian Anatolian holdings. In Van Vilayet, Armenians were a persecuted minority--less than ten years before Gorky's birth, as many as 300,00o Christians (including Armenians and Assyrians) were slaughtered in empire-wide massacres. On the threshold of political anarchy, and a coup d'etat that would depose the very sultan responsible for the Armenian massacres of the late nineteenth century, things were--surprisingly, thrillingly--improving for the Empire's minority populations. Assured protection by the opposition parties challenging the sultan's right to rule, Armenians were agitating for more: liberation, equality, and, often, autonomy. 

 

In 1908, Gorky's father left his family behind for the United States, and the promise of prosperity. Shushan, essentially widowed and responsible for four children, struggled to provide for her family. In 1909, disaster struck--the Armenians and Assyrians of Adana, a large port city along the Mediterranean, were killed en masse. Though the sultan was in exile and the Young Turks, his usurpers, had seized the reigns, the promises they had made to the Empire's Christian peoples had been broken. Liberation was unlikely, equality unexpected, and autonomy nothing but a dream.

 

On April 24, 1915, after years of escalating violence, Constantinople's leading Armenians--intellectuals, artists, even clergymen--were arrested and executed, marking the beginning of the Armenian Genocide: the systematic, wholesale elimination of the Ottoman Empire's largest and most troublesome Christian minority, alongside its Assyrian and Greek communities. Hundreds of miles away, the Armenians of Van rallied to defend their city. For more than a month, they withstood Ottoman attack. Gorky and his family, ensconced within its fortified Armenian quarter, waited for the siege to end. 

 

And it did--the Armenians were overrun, and the survivors were forced to flee. The Adoians--Gorky, his mother, his sisters, and their families--headed east, to Etchmiadzin, the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Ottoman army on their heels, the long train of refugees eventually, miraculously, reached the Russian-held Caucasus, and safety. 

 

Many died at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish irregulars. Those who survived starved--disease and malnutrition slew tens of thousands, among them Shushan, Gorky's mother. This--after everything the Adoians had withstood--was the end. Setrag sent for them, and they escaped to America.

 

It was in the United States that Gorky began to experiment with a paintbrush. It was in the United States that he began teaching, and in America that he met his future wife, Mougouch. It was there that he painted, there that his wife left him and he broke his painting arm, and there, finally, that he committed suicide. 

 

Arshile Gorky was the product of genocide. Though it is reductive to suggest that his creative consciousness was entirely preoccupied by the Armenian Genocide, I propose that his artwork—and his identity—were shaped by the loss of homeland.