'The Paintings of Art Pinajian: A Family Story’

Aris Janigian

The Paintings of Art Pinajian: A Family Story
By Peter Najarian
Regent Press, Berkley, California (July 1, 2015); 228 pages
ISBN 978-1587903212; Paperback $20.00

In March 2013, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and dozens of other websites and news shows reported that a trove of art, valued at $30 million, by a previously unknown painter, had been discovered abandoned in a Long Island house and garage. The artist’s name was Archie Pinajian, and though he’d sold hardly anything during his lifetime, there he was, in death, like Van Gogh, getting his comeuppance.

Mougouch Fielding: Painter Who Became Muse to Arshile Gorky

Paul Levy

Mougouch Fielding (*) was born Agnes Magruder in Boston, Massachusetts in 1921. The name “Mougouch,” an Armenian term of endearment (“little mighty one”), was bestowed by her first husband, the great Armenian-American abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky (1904-1948).

Her father, John Holmes Magruder II, an American naval attaché from an East Coast establishment family, took his Bostonian wife Esther Hosmer, a society beauty, and their family around Europe and Asia on his various postings. Agnes was at school in Washington, The Hague and Switzerland. In Shanghai she became interested in the Communist movement and left, taking a ship across the Pacific, ending up in Iowa City, hoping to be taught by Grant Wood (the painter of American Gothic).

The Riddle of Arshile Gorky's Letters

In the last 25 years Arshile Gorky has become an iconic name in Armenian-American consciousness. A steady flow of exhibitions, catalogues, biographies, and also Aram Egoyan’s film, “Ararat”, has contributed to bring him to the forefront of public exposure. Ironic as it is, it has been the fate of many struggling artists, deeply neglected in their lifetime.