Revelation of Vostanik Manoug Adoian (Arshile Gorky)  

The following is a biographical narrative poem, dedicated to the author’s great-uncle and fine artist Marvin Julian, Gorky’s early art teacher. 

Deep in the lap of evening
I drink your imagery
which seeps into my center
where ancestral ages are awakening —
questions formulating
that do not fit
into language
that I speak —
questions ripening,
not yet uttered aloud. 

However your words, Vostanik, caress
as they expose your purpose —
which you described…

“An artist is left to resurrect his ancient role as the uncoverer and the interpreter, but never the recorder of life’s secrets.”

Armenian man who sprung from the Tigris-Euphrates
one with nature and the cosmos —
“life’s secrets,” charmed and tortured you.

As a boy, the Turks slaughtered
your four grandparents,
six uncles,
three aunts,
during the Armenian massacres —
with your mother, you were herded in the death march
one hundred and fifty miles
through the smoldering deserts of Mesopotamia
as the mountains bared witness
leaving behind from Mosul to Aleppo —
roads paved with hands of Armenian children. 

Sparing your blood, Vostanik
life’s secrets forever stung
your empty arms —
where your beautiful Mamig starved to death. 

Armenian man who sprung from the Tigris-Euphrates
escaped to North America with your sister
sheltering among Watertown’s diaspora
where life’s secrets bestowed you
the language of painting —
the ultimate crime of silence
inside you,
all your relations taken from you
held in distant memory
of Ararat and Van.

“All my vital memories are of my first years; these were the days when I smelt the bread, saw my first red poppy, the moon; the innocent seeing: since then, these memories have become iconography: the shapes, even the colors; millstone, red earth, yellow wheat field, apricots.”

Inventing yourself in New York
City of immigrants —
you called yourself, “Gorky,”
meaning, “bitter”
in the likes of Maxim Gorky, writer and activist
of naturalism and social realism,
while studying master painters in museum halls,
your devoted brush strokes came to fulfill your Mother’s wish
for you, to be a poet —
transforming memory and revelation
from your empty arms —
into empty spaces
with color, shapes and lines —
undefined
by circumstance or convention
while drowning in the vulgarization of nature
which surrounded you —
you spoke of the chronic ignorance. 

“My beloved ones,” he spoke, “one must recognize that an Armenian in America is indeed a strange creature. But I am an Armenian and a man must be himself.” 

Brother Vostanik, if you were still here —
I would seek your presence,
deep in the lap of evening
revelation —
and return your words to you, in which you wrote to your symbolic brother…

“I wish that I were sitting next to you now, so that we could have a nice conversation, discuss everything from mountains to valleys.” 

So, I am making you up too…
we would sit on the cusp of life’s secrets —
in a park among dapples of grape leaves
you would teach us…Armenian Americans…

“The great art of our people lies hidden in the ruins and amid the daily life of remote villages.”

Your breath warm with inner landscapes
of home,
hitting the cool air
dropping secrets lightly from your mouth,
rooting to my center —
that is calling
would unfold to you…. 

I mourn this loss —
of you, Vostanik,
Life’s burning secrets followed you
raging in a fire
that devastated your art studio
ripping away
your paintings —
the voices of the ultimate crime
of silence inside you —
manifested to cancer.

Two years later, Arshile Gorky —
victim of a broken neck
in a grave automobile accident
that crushed your dreams —
the only currency you ever had,
paralyzing your painting arm
and salvation
from an orphaned survivor
that had adopted you —
an identity and language
of imagination…

“The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist.” Gorky shared, “Dreams form the bristles of the artist’s brush. As the eye functions as the brain’s sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.”

Deserted by your wife and daughters,
to escape the poverty
that clung to you from Turkish persecution —
to the Great Depression of the 1930s
man who called himself, “Bitter,”
though never weak, never tired —
in such short time
gave to the world a legacy —
abstract expressionism
from ashes you evolved rainbows
but life’s secrets ravished them
leaving you absent
of any relation, left —
to life. 

“Goodbye My Loved’s,” wrote Vostanik
across a crate in white chalk —
in his barn studio,
where his body was found hanging. 

Brother Vostanik passed into the night life —
to receive his mother and Ararat. 

There are no answers
to my questions —
so I am listening to your language
making lasting impressions
of painted suffering words
and revelation —
Vostanik Manoug Adoian
left behind
to speak. 

“André Breton once said of his friend, ‘Gorky is for me the first painter to whom this secret has been completely revealed.’ — The Eye Spring

1991, 2025 ©

In honor of Watertown’s centennial commemoration of Arshile Gorky and the Armenian Museum of America’s current exhibition — and inspired by her great-uncle Marvin Julian’s relationship with Gorky — Laura, whose father, Frederick F. Margosian, was a museum co-founder and trustee, deepened her research to produce a newly revised edition while preserving the original tenor. https://www.armenianmuseum.org/arshile-gorky