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
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide in culture