I was a young student from Cyprus when I first fell in love with Arshile Gorky’s paintings in the Tate Gallery. His dark-eyed portraits reminded me of my family, his animistic forms in jewel colours of Armenian script and music. Why was I crying tears of joy in a gallery? In the catalogue I found the painter’s real name - Manoug Adoian. He was Armenian like me? He had survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide as had my grandparents. Why was he such a well kept secret? I began my quest to unmask Gorky, suspecting that he had buried his secret identity in his art.

In my home, we spoke Armenian as well as Greek, Turkish and English. At my grandmother’s knee I heard her anguish over the deportations, and blocked my ears. Armenians are an ancient people and the first to accept Christianity in 301. They had lived peacefully on ancestral lands which came under the protectorate of the Ottoman Empire. After centuries of massacres, in 1915 the “Young Turk” government unleashed an exhaustive plan to annihilate the Armenian population. Two million were systematically deported, robbed, raped, slaughtered by troops, civilians and criminals. A ‘hidden Holocaust!’ The British government still refuses to acknowledge this state crime against the Armenians as ‘Genocide’. I lost uncles, aunts, cousins. Our properties were repossessed; my heritage lost. I felt that despair and injustice which must have pushed Gorky to try to forget his past.

I went to New York to see his works in the great museums but was disappointed that the only Armenian artist of international renown was listed as Russian or Georgian. I realized that Gorky had reinvented himself to avoid the stigma, “starving Armenian”, even posing as a nephew of the famous Russian writer whose name meant ‘bitter’. In photos Arshile looked the part with a flamboyant swagger – tall, handsome, with burning eyes and beautiful hands. He painted like an angel earning the epithet, “Picasso of Union Square”.

I flew to Chicago to his sister Vartoosh. The 84 year old ‘passionara’ astonished me with her outbursts. She acted each scene and story. Together the young and destitute pair had arrived from the shores of Lake Van to New York City. “Why don’t they write that my brother fought in the Siege against Turkish forces in Van? We were forced to march, Mummy, Gorky, my sisters, with thousands of other Armenians - many died on the way.” Over 240 miles of volcanic mountain passes they headed north to Erevan. “After Mother died in the famine, Gorky saved my life. He brought me to America. I always knew he would be a great painter. He drew all the time, even in his sleep!’

I was puzzled by the deep split in Gorky and talked to his wife Mogooch who gave me courage. “You are Armenian. You have the key to understanding him.” In New York galleries he was famous for his incisive critiques of art. He had taught American artists, stuck on regionalism, the new approaches in cubism, abstraction and surrealism. André Breton claimed Gorky as the last ‘great Surrealist artist’ and the New Yorkers as the first Abstract Expressionist. By 1945 they had two daughters and his incandescent paintings flowed with graceful movement, tender plant and human forms. But I was desperate to see his landscape of birth.

I landed in Armenia armed with a list from Vartoosh. On my birthday I stared at Mount Ararat towering over Erevan imagining the starving adolescent Gorky. His elderly cousin Azad Adoian told me back home they’d shared a farm in a tiny hamlet, walked barefoot over snow to school, swum in the lake together. ‘I can’t remember anything else,’ he insisted, ‘ A Turk shot my father before my eyes when I was seven.’ But as he spoke he drew on a paper, automatically, as in a trance. And when it was finished he handed me a perfect map of their village Khorkom.

I memorized it and went to find Gorky’s village, also under another name, in the dangerous Kurdish dominated Van region in eastern Turkey. My hands shook with emotion as I filmed the tall poplar trees, mud flat roofed houses by the lake. Across the water on Aghtamar Island as I gazed at the stone relief of the Virgin and Child on the 10th century Holy Cross Church set against the azure lake and snowy mountains, I felt I was standing in a Gorky painting. He had sprung from this ancient soil and art. The desecrated churches, ravaged villages, fallow fields of the Armenians were a reminder of our lost history and culture, but the rape of our collective memory hurt most. Gorky had never left his inner landscape. His mother’s songs, Father’s plough, Grandfather’s apricot tree, Grandmother’s richly illuminated Bibles haunted his masterpieces. Their titles were clues: They Will Take My Island,’ ‘ The Plough and the Song,’’ Waterfall’ ( in Tate Modern). He let Armenia reverberate through his paintings freely. But no one ever read them as the bitter cry of the exile who longs for his stolen home, who reinvents them as lustrous images of his lost paradise.

I was heartened that he had targeted a New World with his blend of ancient and modern art to inspire the best artists in America including de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock. In his forties recognition and success came within his grasp, at last, when he was devastated by a studio fire, cancer, an affair by his wife with his friend Matta, a car injury paralysing his painting arm and the departure of his family. Gorky’s early traumas left him with no resilience to withstand these tremors. He promised his wife her freedom and took his own life in 1948.

Against setbacks I fought to keep my vow to Vartoosh his sister and my book was published under the title, Black Angel, A Life of Arshile Gorky. I sent a promised copy to the film director Atom Egoyan. He wove it into the feature film Ararat and created a female character called “Ani” to play me as Gorky’s biographer.
In London I dramatized my book in four monologues, told by his mother, sister, sweetheart and wife. Two slides on either side of the stage evoke village life, family photographs and Gorky’s paintings. The Armenian flute, ‘duduk’ and Vartoosh’s songs accompany me on Gorky’s passionate odyssey from obscurity to fame. After seventy shows around the world with the latest on off-Broadway and the Whitney Museum of American Art, I look forward to bearing witness to Gorky again in the beautiful Grove Auditorium at Magdalen College next weekend.

Nouritza Matossian is author of Black Angel, A Life of Arshile Gorky (Pimlico 2001)
Inaugural Lecture Arshile Gorky: The American Painter from Armenia
5pm 10 February, Oriental Institute, Pusey Lane, introduced by Prof. Theo van Lint
Black Angel, The Double Life of Arshile Gorky 3.30 & 8pm Sun.15 , 8pm Mon.16 Feb.
Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College Oxford , Tickets 01865 305305
www.ticketsoxford.com