Whitney Museum of American Art: "This portrait of Arshile Gorky and his mother is based on a photograph taken in Armenia in 1912, when the artist was just a child. Three years later, during the Ottoman Turk campaign of Genocide against the Armenians, Gorky, his mother, and his younger sister all survived a death march, but his mother never recovered her health. She died in 1919 from starvation. The following year, the fifteen-year-old Gorky immigrated to the United States with his sister. Gorky, however, did not simply copy the photograph, but painted a meditation on remembrance: the white apron worn by Gorky’s mother makes her appear statue-like, and other areas of the painting seem, like memory itself, unfinished and mutable. The figures’ searching gazes lend the composition psychological intensity, eliciting sympathy yet avoiding outright pathos or sentimentality."

Kebabjian’s entire art was influenced by the disaster that happened to the Western Armenians. Melkon Kebabjian’s “ruins” express not only the destruction and annihilation of the localities of the Armenian nation but also the destruction of the human’s peaceful soul.

Shahen Khachatryan (Аrt critic): "The direction of Surrealism seemed to be the fertile soil of the polarized soul of the artist who survived the Genocide. And whatever could be the plot of imagination, was a real image, unforgotten pain for Tutundjian. The intertwining of the symbolism and realism filled his art with supreme sensitivity and strict independence of the expressive language. The arm ripped off, the cracked brain, the hanging rope, the horrified tree reminding a human face in Tutundjian’s canvases reveal the nightmare he survived."

Tutunjian was born in Amasia (Western Armenia). In 1915 during the Genocide he was taken to Greece together with thousands of Armenian orphans, and in 1923 he left for Paris. In Paris Tutunjian got attracted to surrealism and he found his self-expression by adopting that direction. The “unspeakable truth” that exists in Tutundjian’s art that can possible be entirely imaginative are mere forms of expression for the artists who carries the cruel images and heartbreaking emotions of childhood that cannot be told in words.