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Does anyone know why Arshile Gorky painted hands with no definition or as though the characters wore mittons?”

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Does anyone know why Arshile Gorky painted hands with no definition or as though the characters wore mittons?”

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The figures in his art frequently represent victims, people who can no longer touch those around them, for example victims of the Armenian genocide, of which he was a survivor. The perpetrators of the genocide also used torture techniques that famously involved the beating of hands and feed with metal rods, tearing off fingernails etc. From the linked article: The cut-off hands let us know that mother and child will never touch again, and because we know the events that ensued, we know that his mother, a victim of genocide, died of starvation in his arms. We might also recall that among the many methods of Turkish torture were bastinadoing (the slow, prolonged beating of the hands and feet with sticks or metal rods), tearing out of the fingernails and flesh from the hands, nailing of horseshoes to the feet, and nailing men and women to crosses.(29) It is probable that Gorky witnessed such torture in van and on his death march to the Russian border. Although other paintings of the perio

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