Arshile Gorky (Adonik Vostanian)
Arshile Gorky takes his place among the tragic heroes of art history. A survivor of the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was haunted for the rest of his life by the specters of his lost homeland. His vivid, expressionist masterpieces, which anticipated Abstract Expressionism by some 10 years and pioneered abstract art in North America, reflect his enormous suffering as an exile and outsider in America.
The 1915 Armenian Genocide brought the destitute young Arshile Gorky from the shores of Lake Van in Turkey to New York city. His rise as America's greatest surrealist painter and his bitter suicide are dramatized by his biographer through four beloved women: his mother, sister, sweetheart and wife. ( www.ArshileGorky.com )

"Organization" by Arshile Gorky
 

Ivan Ayvazovski (Hovhannes Ayvazian)
The Russian-Armenian well-known painter of seas and oceans, painted and exhibited canvases depicting the massacres of Armenians by Sultan Abdul Hamid (1895). It was with pain and grief that he painted his last canvas "The Explosion of the Turkish Ship", which he could not finish. He threw into the sea the medal that the Sultan had given him years before. This tragic reality shocked the Artist: "My heart is full of grief for our ill-fated people; for this tragic and unprecedented massacre", he wrote to the Armenian Catholicos Khrimian Hayrik.
 ( www.gallerys.h1.ru/aivazovsky/ayvazovski.htm )