Black Angel - A Life of Arshile Gorky, Nouritza Matossian - 20 April 1999

20.4.1999 PASYDY Auditorium 8:00 p.m. British author Nouritza Matossian's performance of her biography in a One-Woman Show. Nouritza Matossian's performance of Gorky's life is a moving and poignant experience. She is one of those timeless story tellers who perhaps still exists in the middle of Asia. I loved every minute and wished it had gone on for hours. The combination of text, performance and pictures was a marvel.
- Polly Hope -

This extraordinary book passionately lays bare the tortured soul of one of this century's great artists Arshile Gorky. Tracing his childhood in western Armenia through to his flight to America, Nouritza Matossian vividly explores the sources of Gorky's unique genius.
- Atom Egoyan -

Matossian's portrayal of the artistic development and influence of a painter remembered by art history as the link between European Surrealist painters and the Abstract Expressionist movement in America is thoroughly researched. But where her particular talent lies is in her perception that the key to Gorky's work rests in Armenian history. Armenian herself, Matossian has a deep emotional affinity with her subject. She is the first of his biographers who speaks and reads his language. She exposes deliberate misinformations and breaks new ground. This is a biography so richly researched that every chapter brings a cluster of stories. Readers will be swept along by a compulsive narrative and charmed to find something so like a love affair between biographer and subject revealed. One is almost unsurprised, turning to the author's photograph, to find that Matossian bears a striking resemblance to the lost mother with whom Gorky felt such a profound connection.
- Rachel Campell-Johnston - The Times 31 Dec.1998

A rich biography; a sympathetic book. It is Matossian's thesis that Gorky's Virginia summer connected the artist to his Armenian childhood, "Gorky was painting his interior Armenia". Her reconstruction of the New York art world of Gorky's time is as informative as the picture she paints of Gorky's corner of Armenia, before the First World War. Her narrative of the suffering of Gorky and his family on the hunger march which led to his mother's death - is as shattering as her account of Gorky's personal agony at the end of his life. Beyond that, the book helps one to focus on Gorky as an artist. And it makes room for the kind of interpretation Matossian advances.
- Arthur C. Danto -, Times Literary Supplement. 22 January 1999

Nouritza Matossian, gave a unique performance for her book launch at the invitation of the Royal College of Art on 1st December. It was a brilliant and moving enactment of his life as told by Gorky's mother, sister, Armenian sweetheart and American wife. She narrated, played, danced and acted consecutive decades of Gorky's life with slides and music. She appeared to add lib from a mine of stories and observations in a polished and elegant structure. She held their attention for an hour with humour, energy and tragedy. Slides of his art, Armenia and family photographs were interwoven with simplicity into her narrative showing how the dramatic events of his in historic Armenia and subsequent tragedies of his studio fire, illness, betrayal, car accident directly affected his drawings and paintings.

This highly originally stage piece is possibly the first occasion when a writer takes to the stage to perform her biography in a one-woman show. Matossian moved with physical grace and expressiveness.

In a fluid red gown, a scarf wrapped around her head like Gorky's famous portrait, The Artist and His Mother, she opens with a poignant folk song and speaks in Armenian to introduce the indomitable mother who protected him during the Genocide and died young of famine. She was wiry as his plucky younger sister who escaped with her brother to America and corresponded with him in Armenian. She is entertaining with comic anecdotes as his hithertounknown Armenian sweetheart, the gorgeous model Ruth French. Finally as Agnes his Bostonian wife of seven years, she acted the dramatic and tragic events of his final years. In a terse ending she unfurled her only prop, a yellow scarf, and hypnotically folded away Gorky's life with his tragic suicide.

In London the piece was premiered to a packed audience at the Royal College of Art and then repeated at the Kensington Town Hall. At the book launch hosted by the Ambassador to Armenia, H.E. Armen Sarkissian, Alison Samuel of Chatto & Windus, Deanne Petherbridge, Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of ARt, members of the diplomatic and artistic circles of London, joined two hundred guests from all over the world. Both the book and the one-woman show were received as a tour de force, gripping,entertainin and lyrical.
- Chatto - & Windus, Random House UK