The Deadly Allure of Disturbed Paintings
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Uncover the dark secrets of disturbed paintings that pulse with their creators’ tormented spirits. Arshile Gorky’s haunted visions and Ilya Repin’s lethal portraits unleash tragedy on subjects, viewers, and owners alike—where every stroke carries an otherworldly malevolence that refuses to fade. Will you risk the gaze?
Disturbed Paintings
Some paintings carry an unnatural power. They radiate the tormented essence of their creators, dooming both the subjects they depict and the souls who dare to gaze upon them. These are the disturbed paintings—vessels of misfortune, vessels of death.
Arshile Gorky: The Black One and His Family Curse
Arshile Gorky, born Vostanik Manoug Adoian in 1904, emerged from a village on the shores of Lake Van in the Ottoman Empire—now modern-day Turkey. Tragedy marked him from the beginning. In 1919, his mother starved to death in Yerevan, Armenia. As Armenian Christians, his family endured brutal oppression under Ottoman and Turkish rulers. His mother, Sushan, had already witnessed horrors: Turkish soldiers murdered her first young husband for joining a rebel force. She was fourteen when she wed her first husband, and at nineteen, she married a widower, Sedrak Adoian, thirty-six years old. They raised three children. Gorky, the only son, became her favored child. She dreamed he would become a poet or priest, yet she warned him of a dark destiny. She called him “the black one,” the unlucky soul destined for a terrible end. As an adult, Gorky himself spoke of the “family curse.”
In 1920, he reached America and reunited with his father, who had abandoned them in 1908. Three years later, he enrolled at the New England School of Art in Boston, though he largely taught himself. He fell into a romance with artist Corinne West, then married Agnes Magruder in 1941—a wealthy socialite twenty years his junior. He affectionately called her Mougouch, an Armenian endearment. True to her bohemian spirit, she had already moved in with him before the wedding.
It seemed he was doomed to relive a pattern of abandonment with his choice of spouse. She said of their relationship:
“I told him that I felt it was quite impossible to be faithful. How one person couldn’t be all things to everybody from birth to death. Surely there were all sorts of facets to everybody’s personality. When I first went to live with him, I couldn’t understand what I’d done. It was all right then because I had a bolt hole. I could go and see my parents or my grandfather on Cape Cod. I could do things, couldn’t I? But once I was married, well, he didn’t want me to go out any more, working nights or days.”
Gorky’s depression deepened into violence, and 1946 delivered fresh torment. Fire consumed his barn studio, destroying thirty paintings and his cherished library. Echoing family legend, his grandmother had once torched a church in defiance of a God who allowed her son’s torture by the Turks. When flames engulfed his own studio, Gorky refused to call the fire brigade. He battled the blaze alone, as if surrendering to the curse. In tribute to the lost works, he later painted Charred Beloved I and Charred Beloved II.
The following year brought more ruin. Surgeons performed a colostomy for rectal cancer. His estranged father died. Meanwhile, his wife began an affair with fellow artist Roberto Matta. In the summer of 1948, Agnes fled with their two young daughters, Maro and Natasha, unable to endure his deepening despair and outbursts. She later married writer Xan Fielding.
That same week, Julien Levy, a gallery owner drunk behind the wheel, crashed the car carrying Gorky. The impact broke his neck and back, forcing him into a neck brace and temporarily paralyzing his painting arm.
On July 19, he returned home, “driven by Isamu Noguchi, as well as Wilfredo Lam and his wife Helena. On the way, Gorky asked to stop to see Dr. Weiss, his psychiatrist. When he got back in the car, he told Noguchi that the doctor wants to perform a lobotomy on him.”
On July 21, 1948, he confided his suicidal intentions to students and a neighbor. He removed his neck brace, climbed into the rafters of his Connecticut barn studio, and hanged himself. In chalk on a wooden crate, he scrawled: “Goodbye, My Loveds.” Ironically, Life magazine had recently featured his barn studio. His barking dog eventually led a neighbor to discover the body.
After Gorky’s death, Agnes traveled Europe with Matta and placed their daughters in a Swiss boarding school rather than allow Gorky’s sister to adopt them.
Did Gorky’s ill fortune seep into his very brushstrokes? Rumors swirl that the paintings he created between 1904 and 1938 carry an active curse.
In 2003, an Armenian activist shared chilling accounts with a researcher: gallery whispers in New York spoke of “Gorky’s curse.” The Orators burned in a 1957 fire. The Calendars was utterly destroyed. Other works mysteriously fell from the walls. Witnesses reported a black-haired ghost in a blue overcoat haunting Gorky’s old house in Sherman, Connecticut. Art dealers swore his paintings were haunted.
On March 1, 1962, fifteen Gorky paintings boarded American Airlines Flight 1 bound for an exhibition in Los Angeles. Two minutes after takeoff, the plane rolled and plunged into a swamp, killing 95 people and burying the artworks in mud. Among the dead were high-profile figures: Admiral Richard Lansing Conolly, Union Carbide VP George T. Felbeck, former Cities Service chairman W. Alton Jones (a friend of Eisenhower), Louise Eastman (whose daughter later married Paul McCartney), and Olympic gold medalist Emelyn Whiton.
In 1937, Gorky painted a portrait of fellow artist Anna Walinska. It remained within her family privately for decades. When sold in the late 1970s to cover rising costs, it failed to find buyers at Bodley Gallery and Sotheby’s auction. A private broker finally moved it for almost nothing. It joined roughly fifty other lost Gorky works.
In 2021, beneath The Limit (1947), his daughter Maro discovered another hidden painting, Untitled (Virginia Summer), painted during the fateful summer of 1947.
Ilya Repin: Portraits That Kill
Ilya Repin, the renowned 19th-century Ukrainian painter born in 1844, began creating as a teenager and won his first prize at twenty-five. In 1872, the Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich commissioned him. That same year, he married Vera Shevtsova. Their fifteen-year union produced four children amid Repin’s repeated affairs.
In 1885, his harrowing portrait Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son sparked outrage and removal from exhibitions. The intense work paralyzed his right hand; he taught himself to paint with his left.
New commissions and acclaim followed, yet a sinister pattern emerged. Sitting for Repin often carried a fatal price. Between 1870 and 1873, he created Barge Haulers on the Volga, depicting eleven robust men. After the painting’s completion, they began dying one by one.
In the late 1870s, he painted A Man with an Evil Eye using his godfather Ivan Radov—a known sorcerer—as a model. Repin suffered mysterious fevers upon finishing it, perhaps inspiring the title. The work earned acclaim in 1878.
Portraits of Mussorgsky (1839–1881), Pisemsky (1821–1881), Pirogov (1810–1881), pianist Louise, Countess de Mercy-Argenteau (1837–1890), and Fedor Tiutchev (1803–1873) preceded or coincided with their deaths.
Right after Repin completed The Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council in 1903, several depicted officials perished in the violence of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Prime Minister Stolypin sat for Repin, then fell to an assassin’s bullet in Kyiv in 1911.
In 1913, Abram Balashov attacked Ivan the Terrible and His Son with a knife, slashing it three times while screaming, “Stop the bloodshed!” Authorities confined him to a mental asylum. The Tretyakov Gallery’s curator, Georgy Khruslov, threw himself under a train upon learning of the vandalism. Repin helped restore the painting.
Even on display, the work inspired anxiety, tears, and dread in viewers. In May 2018, a drunken visitor smashed the protective glass with a metal bar, piercing the canvas three times. He received a 2.5-year prison sentence.
Repin met Natalja Nordman in 1890; she became his common-law wife. In 1899, they built the country estate Penates, where they hosted Russian society for thirty years. Natalia died of tuberculosis in 1914. Repin, horrified by Bolshevik terror after the October Revolution, passed away in 1930 at eighty-six and rests buried at Penates.
The disturbed paintings endure. Their creators poured anguish, curses, and otherworldly forces onto canvas—and those forces refuse to rest. View them at your peril. The essence lingers. The misfortune spreads. The dead still watch.
