The Artist and His Mother

“I don’t like that word, “finish.” When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting—I just stop working on it for a while.” These are the worlds of Arshile Gorky, one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 20th century, and perhaps an explanation for why he worked on this painting for nearly twenty years. As a child, Gorky watched his mother die of starvation, ill in health after surviving a death march during the Ottoman Turk genocide of the Armenians. Years later, having left Armenia and changed his name, Gorky found a photograph of himself and his mother taken when he was only eight years old. He laboured that image into a painting, reworking and improving, leaving it for months at a time and then returning in moments of inspiration. In this way, the painting was never finished, and so his mother remained alive, and in a sort of daily dialogue with her son. The double portrait is one of the most revered and admired in modern art, the depths of its sadness only matched by the wealth of its beauty.