Armenian genocide in culture
[1] According to historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson, the Armenian genocide had reached an "iconic status" as "the apex of horrors conceivable" prior to World War II.
[3] 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.
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.
Scholars on Gorky agree that the 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.
These eclectic attributes that seeped into Gorky's paintings show the struggle he endured to become recognized by drawing influence from other great masters.
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire.
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 penitence for the genocide is the main theme of Stone Dreams (Daş Yuxular), the novel of the Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli, written in 2006.
The award-winning historical novel Who She Left Behind by Victoria Atamian Waterman published in 2023 by Historium Press is an emotionally heartwrenching story set in various time periods, from the declining days of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey in 1915 to the Armenian neighborhoods of Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the 1990s.
The novel completely immerses its reader in a lesser-known era and the untold stories of the brave and resilient women who became the pillars of reconstructed communities after the Armenian Genocide.
[29] In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones: Will and Testament, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey.
