By: Betty Apigian-Kessel
Don McLean’s 1971 song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)” tells about the tormented Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. It can also be a reminder of the life of Gorky, who was born in Van, in historic Armenia, and who, like Van Gogh, ended his own life. Is it just a coincidence that both artists, who became famous after death, have a connection to the word “van”?
Here are some of the lyrics, as I write about my conversation with Gorky’s 91-year-old niece, Liberty “Libby” Miller (nee Azadouhie Amerian), who was born in Watertown, Mass., and currently resides in California. She is the daughter of Akabi, Gorky’s elder half-sister.
“Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and gray, look out on a summer’s day, with eyes that know the darkness in my soul… And when no hope was in sight, you took your own life. But I could have told you this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you…”
It was an intricate web of relationships that eventually led me to a fateful meeting with Libby Miller. This column was being forwarded to someone named “Cher.” I soon found out she was not the celebrity singer we are all familiar with but to Libby’s daughter.
During our phone conversations, Libby’s voice sparkles with her happy spirit. She is full of East Coast history. Watertown and the friends she left behind still hold a special place in her heart. In the mid 1940’s, the Amerians moved to the West Coast.
Libby is a long-time and proud member of the Vasbouragan Society, having attended conventions until just a few years ago, and is acquainted with many Detroit area Vanetsis.
Libby’s father left Turkey in 1911 to escape conscription into the Turkish army. He arrived in this country first settling in Providence, R.I., and later moving to Watertown, where Libby was a member of the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) Watertown “Gaidzag” Chapter and remembers General Karekin Nedjeh. Although he was a few years older, she recalls Harvard graduate Jim Tashjian being in the same chapter.
Libby fondly recalls her AYF days, stating, “All of us were more like brothers and sisters. We had a wonderful childhood growing up in Watertown—the picnics, the khnjouks, hantesses, and the conventions. We never stayed in hotels, only in the homes of other Armenians.”
Our conversations often include her famous uncle, Armenian American abstract surrealist painter Vosdanig Manoug Adoian, who she says for professional purposes changed his name to Arshile Gorky.
The Amerians bought a three-story house in Watertown, previously owned by Italians and containing a lot of fancy frieze trim. Gorky, then a struggling young artist, was a frequent visitor to his sister Akabi’s home for dinner and drink. She chuckles as she fondly recalls his open disdain for the newly painted walls and frieze. “I don’t like colors,” he would say. “The decorating should be all white.”
Libby says Gorky spoke English well with hardly a trace of an accent.
“He visited us frequently and my mother always made his favorite Armenian bread nanour and home brewed raki for him.”
According to Libby, Manoug Adoian’s relatives did not mind when he changed his name to Arshile Gorky because, first of all, they did not know he would become so famous.
“We were young and naive and did not give thought to him changing his name. Besides, Vosdanig Manoug Adoian would have been a difficult name to carry as an artist. Also at that time he did as others were doing, changing their name reflecting a Russian origin.”
Another name could have also meant a fresh start for a who had seen so much death and destruction in Van and other parts of Armenia, as he and his mother Shoushanig escaped from their home during the 1915 genocide.
His father, Setrag, had left Van years earlier for America to earn money, with the idea of bringing the family over later. Gorky felt bitterness towards his father because the remainder of the family barely escaped from Van to Yerevan, and that is where his mother died of starvation in her son’s arms.
Libby tells of a photo her mother Akabi had of Gorky, his mother, and father hanging on their wall in Watertown. In 1943, Gorky asked to have the picture and Akabi was reluctant to give it up, but Gorky promised to return it. He took the photograph, painted the now famous painting of him and his mother together, leaving his father’s image completely out of it.
He never returned the photograph to Akabi. It can only be surmised that it was left with his belongings in his New York studio, to be lost forever.
Last year, Libby Amerian Miller traveled with her daughter Cher to the Gorky exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She says she is happy she did so even though the trip was difficult for her. There she met Gorky’s former wife, Agnes Fielding, now of London, England, whom Gorky had endearingly nicknamed “Magooch,” and their daughters Maro and Natasha.
