Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother | Video in American Sign Language
Apr 18, 2018
In “Untitled” (America) and Where We Are.
An educator discusses The Artist and His Mother by Gorky Arshile in the exhibition Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960
This painting is a portrait of the artist himself, Arshile Gorky, with his mother, which is based on a photograph taken in his native Armenia in 1912, when the artist was just a child.
Three years later, during the Ottoman Turk campaign of genocide against the Armenians, Gorky, his mother, and his younger sister all survived a death march, but his mother never recovered her health. She died in 1919 from starvation. The following year, the fifteen-year-old Gorky immigrated to the United States with his sister.
In 1926, he began work on this painting. Gorky, however, did not simply copy the photograph, but painted a meditation on remembrance: the white apron worn by Gorky’s mother makes her appear statue-like, and other areas of the painting seem, like memory itself, unfinished and mutable. The figures’ searching gazes lend the composition psychological intensity, eliciting sympathy yet avoiding outright pathos or sentimentality.