“Have you ever heard of ‘Gorky’s curse’?” Nouritza Matossian asked me on a cloudy Thursday afternoon in March 2003. We were at her home in Hampstead (London) and I remember how tired I felt. Until that moment, I had been conducting research for two full months. Since my time in London was brief, I had filled my days with as many interviews as possible. Before I met with Nouritza, I had already spoken with the Armenian ambassador to Great Britain, an Armenian artist and an Armenian minister in London. I was actually too tired and too exhausted to satisfactorily conduct another interview. Yet her story caught my attention and would eventually be one of those interviews that turned my whole research upside down. Nouritza continued:

There is a rumour going round the galleries of New York that Gorky’s paintings are cursed. The painting The Orators has been damaged in a fire in 1957. Another painting – The Calendars – has been completely destroyed. Then there are rumours of paintings falling from walls and of a black-haired ghost in a blue overcoat that visits Gorky’s old house in Sherman, Connecticut. The art dealers I have spoken with in New York are absolutely convinced that the work of Gorky is haunted.

Nouritza Matossian¹ is the author of the book, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (2001), and I first met her in February 2003 during a symposium at the Armenian embassy in London. She told me then that she was originally from Cyprus and had moved to England when she was 16. Later, on the aforementioned afternoon in March, I arrived to write down her life story and derive from what Geertz (1973) so poetically called the ‘the webs of meaning’: “… man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take cultures to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973: 5). As a student, this quote had continually inspired me; it gave me a specific angle to view the dynamics of culture and cultural processes. Cultures weren’t static, they were reproduced. They were webs that created meaning and during my interview with Nouritza, I had a better glimpse of these webs than I initially suspected.

I did not really know who Gorky was. I mean, I had heard of him, and I had read something about his abstract art, but I had never seen any of his works. I thought he was a Russian artist who had taken refuge in the United States after World War I and the Bolshevist Revolution. He did not carry an Armenian surname.² Only much later I discovered that his real name was Vosdanig Manoug Adoian. I remember how I walked into Tate Gallery and how I was nailed to the ground when I saw her face on the wall. The painting was called The Artist and his Mother and I recognized it. There was something about those eyes. I don’t remember exactly what, neither can I explain it, but they were so familiar to me that tears welled up. Looking back, I recognized something in all of his paintings – even the abstract ones. The Armenianness in his art was so obvious.³

Nouritza’s life story is a familiar one, as I heard the same from other female respondents of her generation. It is a story of resistance against tradition and of finding a balance between the Armenian culture and the culture of her Western host countries.

Nouritza was born in Cyprus on 24 April 1945—“a typical Armenian day,” as she put it⁴—and lived in a district with Turkish and Armenian immigrants. “We kind of had to rely on each other. Our grandparents did not speak the Greek language and because of that we ended up in the same district as other immigrants. I now speak fluent English, Armenian, Greek and Turkish.” The Armenian language and history were not taught in the English primary schools and Nouritza remembers how on Saturdays she had Armenian lessons with other children her age. “I think that is the first thing Armenian immigrants did; start an Armenian primary school. The Turks and Greeks did not go to school. The Armenians quickly realized that education was the single most important thing to get ahead in the English society.”

Nouritza does not remember open hostility between Armenians and Turks. What she does remember is the close-knit subculture the Armenians developed within the district. “There were tunnels connecting Armenian households together and especially the women used the roofs to visit each other.”

Nouritza’s maternal grandmother had survived the genocide of 1915. “My father had come to Cyprus as a young boy in 1913. My grandmother ended up in Cyprus during the exodus in 1918.” From an early age, she had heard the stories of the death marches and how her grandmother and her first daughter, Satarnik (Nouritza’s aunt), made themselves as unattractive as possible. “They used ashes to rub their skins with, which made them look unnatural and ill.” Satarnik did not survive the death marches and her grandmother’s second daughter—Nouritza’s mother—was named in honour of her deceased sister. “It was a way to commemorate the past—an homage to their firstborn.”

Nouritza grew up in a subculture that was trapped in a constant sense of danger, partially due to the past and partially to the Armenians’ minority status in the district. “It was a community that constant felt threatened. ‘Don’t carry any jewellery’, my grandmother would say over and over again. ‘Don’t carry any jewellery, for they will cut off your fingers to get them.’” Or: “Never build a house when there is a Turk close, for you will irrevocably lose it”.⁵

As a young teenager, who in a large part received her education at an English primary school and could identify with the English community more than her parents could, Nouritza experienced the Armenian subculture on Cyprus as claustrophobic and confining due to the community’s reaction to the Armenians’ perceived risk. “It was a very patriarchal community. The preservation of the Armenian identity was seen as a sacred goal. To marry a non-Armenian, an odar, was the equivalent of death. You were banished from the community.”

At 16, Nouritza left for England, where she eventually married a German–American musician.

I think I very deliberately did not choose an Armenian, although we did have an Armenian wedding. The irony, therefore, is that in England, more even than in Cyprus, I became aware of my Armenian cultural background. In Cyprus, you were part of a clearly defined community, whereas here [in England] you only sporadically would meet Armenians. You did not see each other that often. Only in England, I really became interested in Armenian history.

Nouritza’s contact with Gorky’s paintings therefore was more than an acquaintance between an art-lover and an artist. It was a meeting between a painter who deliberately changed his surname, and a young woman who was searching for the traces of her cultural heritage at that time in her life.

Now, years later, that same woman was sitting in a half-dark living room. “Take a look at this painting,” she said, while she sat down next to me on the couch with an enormous book. It was a painting of a tall boy, who was standing next to his mother, his dark eyes staring at the spectator with a penetrating gaze. The woman looked fragile and pale in comparison to the boy. “Pay attention to the hands, they are drawn vague and volatile. The details are mostly in the face. As if Gorky forces you to look at the faces, as if he preferred you to ignore everything around it. Now look at this,” and she grabbed another book from the small table in front of us and showed me a black and white picture of a mother and a son. The comparisons between the picture and the painting were sublime. Maybe the dress of the woman had changed of motive and colour, and Gorky had used his brown, blue and red pastel nuances to bring a warmth, but also a haunting atmosphere to the canvas that was missing from the black and white photograph. A single glance said it all—this was a self-portrait. The painter clearly tried to tell us something here that would gain meaning in the context of his entire oeuvre. Nouritza said, “It took him years to make this painting. There are a lot of sketches found in which he drew the face of his mother from different angles. He eventually made two versions.” The eyes of the mother were staring mysteriously at me. They were both sad and warm at the same time. “Typical Armenian eyes,” Nouritza added, as if she had read my mind.

Even before I started my research, I would go out socially with a long-time Armenian friend. I remember in 2002, I went to a pizzeria and he introduced me to three other Armenians, which was a strange and surreal experience. Here was my friend whom I had known for years, but who I had never heard speak in a language I did not know. I was cordially received at the table, and I remember that our conversations quickly moved to politics, the Armenian genocide, Armenian art and “Armenianness,”⁶ which as an anthropologist-to-be interested me immensely. I heard a story that night, which I would hear later during my research in several variations. It was a story about two Armenians who did not know each other by name or face, but who recognized each other as Armenians as soon as they passed each other on the street. “How can that be?” I asked at one point during the conversation. “The eyes,” they answered. “It’s the look in their eyes. You recognize it immediately.”

Now, a pair of those eyes was staring back at me from a book. “What other paintings did he [Gorky] make?” I asked Nouritza. She at once showed me a couple of photographs. These were pictures of busy and abstract paintings, full of ink stains—or so they seemed to be to my untrained eyes—that poured into each other, collided, and cut across the canvas with lines and curves. Agony, Diary of a Seducer and They Will Take My Island were titles that caught my gaze. They lacked the warmth and softness of the first painting of a mother and a son. “Do you see it?” she asked, simultaneously leafing through the book and looking at me. “Do you see the difference? Between this painting (The Artist and His Mother) and the paintings that followed?” I nodded. The first one was a portrait and harmonious, the others were fragmented and abstract. “This one was inspired by a picture, a memory before the genocide. The other, darker works came in the time after…”