Armenian Genocide in culture

Art

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide in art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.

The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, are considered to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period. In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. His two The Artist and His Mother paintings are based on a photograph with his mother taken in Van.

A case study of Gorky’s 1946-7 painting The Plough and the Song, reveals central themes of suffering and loss, starvation and hunger, and cultural nostalgia emerge through his biomorphic and organically curvilinear forms representing fertility and nature. Through warm, earthy colors, he paints from memory the fertile agricultural lands of his Armenian homeland. He reconstructs a new hybridized identity in America, an amalgam of visual cultural practice of modern art of the West and wistfulness for the rich culture of the Armenian people, reflected in his paintings. The Plough and the Song materializes the dialectic of violence and culture in the fractured history of the Armenian people.

Scholars on Gorky agree that suffering and loss he experienced during the Armenian Genocide strongly informed the production of his modernist paintings in America. Comparisons of Gorky’s The Plough and the Song (1946-7) with works of his contemporaries in the field of organic biomorphic abstraction reveal the stark manifestation of his experiences of brutality and horror. Gorky appears to have systematically developed the imagery of the canvas such that many of his biomorphic forms appear to be “bleeding,” alluding to the horrors and violence he witnessed during the Armenian Genocide. He depicts red far more fluidly, yet systematically. Several of his forms appear to be “bleeding,” given the semblance of a trail of blood that streams down from the inflicted “wounds” on the biomorphic forms. Gorky makes liberal use of shading to deliberately draw attention to the fact that these ebbing blots and streams of red are, in fact, bleeding wounds. Yet, the ironic truth in the way Gorky seems to weld his nostalgia for Armenian culture and rich heritage with the violent history of genocide in a single compositional frame ultimately reflects many Armenians’ own views of their fractured history. There exists a constant dialectic of culture and barbarism in the history of Armenians, where violence persists a theme as constant as the beauty of its culture and its people.

Upon coming to America in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, Gorky reconstructed a new identity for himself, as he changed his name from Vosdanig Manoug Adoian to Arshile Gorky, a name that harkened to Georgian-Russian aristocracy and literati of the Caucasus region. In 1922, he enrolled at the New School of Design in Boston, a city, which at that time, was home to a large immigrant population of Armenian Americans. When he later moved to New York, where he taught at the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art, Gorky was thrown into the briskly evolving realm of modern art. As he began to experiment, his early works began to reflect stylistic elements of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. In her book, Black Angel: The Life of Archile Gorky, Armenian scholar Nouritza Matossian likens seminal influences on Gorky’s work and style, including Egyptian funerary art for pose, Cézanne for flat planar composition, to Picasso for form and color, and to Ingres for simplicity of line and smoothness. These eclectic attributes that seeped into Gorky’s paintings show the struggle he endured to become recognized by drawing influence from other great masters.

Through the Westernization of Armenian painting, Gorky was able to communicate his worldview: his memories of the fertile, natural beauty of an idyllic agricultural lifestyle in Armenia, a beauty ruptured by the horrors of bloodshed and violence inflicted by the Armenian Genocide on his people. His symbolic depictions of bleeding female fertility against a backdrop of chaos communicate his artistic worldview of how the Late Ottoman Empire ravaged a multi-ethnic empire clean of ethno-linguistic and religious diversity. The dialectic of beauty and violence is one that frames his worldview on representations of genocide through Westernized Armenian painting.

Literature

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism, and his books were burnt by the Nazis. Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel's 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era. Armenian American writer William Saroyan emphasized the Armenians' ability to survive in his 1935 short story The Armenian and the Armenian.

Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 novel Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme. Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include Louis de Berniéres' Birds without Wings, Edgar Hilsenrath's German-language The Story of the Last Thought, David Kherdian's The Road from Home and Polish author Stefan Żeromski's 1925 The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan's 2006 anthology "The Black Knight's God" includes a fictional survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

A penitence for the genocide is a main theme of Stone Dreams (Daş Yuxular), the novel of the Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli, written in 2006. After the publishing the novel Aylisli was harassed by the state and his books were burnt. The novel Among the Ashes (Küller Arasında), 2009, by the Turkish writer Halil İbrahim Özcan also tells about the Armenian genocide.

Theatre

Richard Kalinoski's play, Beast on the Moon, is about two Armenian Genocide survivors. Anoush Baghdassarian's play, "FOUND," is a historical fiction play about a woman's experience through the Armenian Genocide. It follows the story of a girl named Lucine who is searching for her brother who was taken by Turkish soldiers in 1915 at the start of the genocide. The stage is split in half and while "Old Lucine (1925)" on stage right writes in her diary of memories of the past ten years, "Young Lucine (1915)" acts them out on stage left. It has been performed in New York (2013) and California (2014). In 2014, Devon Jackson's play Nameless premiered at Queen's University in the lead-up to the commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. A verbatim theatre play on the Armenian Genocide I Wish To Die Singing – Voices From The Armenian Genocide by Neil McPherson (artistic director) played at the Finborough Theatre, London, from 21 April to 16 May 2015.

Film

The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a Hollywood production titled Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002 Ararat. There are also references in Elia Kazan's America, America and Henri Verneuil's Mayrig. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events, based on Antonia Arslan's book, La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks).

Films

Documentary films

Music

Here is a list of musical works dedicated to the Armenian Genocide and related events:

The American band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide through its lyrics, including P.L.U.C.K. and in concerts.

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".