Sixteen Years Erasing a Mother's Hands: Arshile Gorky and The Artist and His Mother

September 15, 2026

In 1912, an eight-year-old boy named Vostanik Adoian stood in a photography studio in Van, an ancient city in Ottoman Armenia, wearing a heavy overcoat and holding a small nosegay of flowers. Seated beside him was his mother, Shushaniq der Marderosian, draped in a dark headscarf and a traditional embroidered apron. They had posed for the studio portrait to mail across the Atlantic to Providence, Rhode Island, where Vostanik's father, Manoug Adoian, had fled four years earlier in 1908 to escape conscription into the Ottoman military.

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother by Arshile Gorky — *Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother* (c. 1926–c. 1942) by Arshile Gorky. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

From Van to New York: The 1912 Studio Photograph

Three years after the photograph was taken, the Armenian Genocide tore through Van in April 1915. Vostanik, his sister Vartoosh, and their mother were driven onto a forced march toward Yerevan; in March 1919, Shushaniq starved to death in her son's arms in Yerevan at thirty-nine years old. Escaping to the United States in 1920 at age sixteen, Vostanik reinvented himself as Arshile Gorky, claiming kinship to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky to distance himself from refugee stigmas in New York while forging his early path toward abstract art, drawing inspiration from European surrealism and early modernism.

In his father's American house, Gorky recovered the original 1912 studio portrait. Around 1926, he stretched two monumental linen surfaces to translate the photograph into an oil painting: one now in the Whitney Museum of American Art (measuring 152.4 by 127.6 centimeters, accession 50.17) and another in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (measuring 152.3 by 127 centimeters, accession 1979.13.1).

Sixteen Years on Canvas: Scraping, Erasing, and the Myth of Finished Art

Rather than executing a single, straightforward tribute, Gorky labored over both works of canvas art for over sixteen years; he scraped down the paint layers, wiped away brushstrokes, and repainted the surfaces hundreds of times until his mother's face assumed the smooth, unyielding polish of an ancient stone icon, while deliberately stripping the decorative floral pattern from her apron into a flat wash of pale color and paring her hands down into unarticulated, porcelain-like white shapes. When questioned about his reluctance to complete his canvases, Gorky remarked: "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."

Debunking the Letters: How the True Story Lives in the Paint

For decades, art literature surrounded Gorky's process with romanticized, literary descriptions of his mother's eyes and apron, derived from published letters edited by his nephew Karlen Mooradian. In 2009, biographer Matthew Spender published Arshile Gorky: A Life Through Letters and Documents, establishing that many of those widely cited letters had been heavily embellished or constructed long after Gorky's death. The genuine record of Gorky's grief was not written in flowery prose, but physically etched into the canvas surface through decades of sanding, scraping, and leaving his mother's hands untouchable.