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Around this same time, Manookian met Cyril Lemmon, a young architect who was dabbling in painting. They began to paint together, and by late 1930 Arman was living downstairs in Lemmon's Black Point home. Anne Simms Stubenberg, the daughter of next door neighbor Arthur Simms, still remembers taking an art lesson from Manookian as a seven year old. He patiently spent hours assisting her with a painting of a red blossomed tree, and gave her a tin painting box. He also, on another occasion, picked her up by the hair, something that even a child could understand as a hint that something was wrong with the artist. The Lemmon's living room was filled with paintings, salon style, including a Diego Rivera. At Black Point, in the last months of his life, Manookian was experimenting with a more modern style of painting, adding hints of cubist distortion borrowed from Rivera. It didn't always go well, and he apparently destroyed a number of his own artworks along the way. A meticulous artist, he still planned each work on a grid, but he was blending his paint more, softening colors, and attempting to emulate the greater distortions of Modernism. He also attempted, in a 1930 painting of a woman weaving a mat, to move away from the world of myth into the depiction of the contemporary.
As Arman struggled in Hawai'i, his brother, Vahe, had become a student in a seminary in Geneva, learning French. Two years younger, he had taken on the responsibility of earning enough money to bring his mother and sister out of Turkey. Eight thousand miles away, Arman was unable to help. His sister Adrinne wrote to a friend in a 1975 letter recounting Manookian's fate: "He did not write too often and we worried a lot." She was right to worry, as her brother must have been emotionally fragile by early 1931. She was right to worry, as her brother was emotionally fragile. His obituary in the Star-Bulletin reported that: "On one occasion he took down a group of paintings that were on exhibition, tore them across and threw them into a waste basket."
He also apparently once turned down a mural commission because he was busy and "could not be bothered." He delivered his last painting, "Flamingos in Flight," on Thursday, May 7, 1931, to the home of Charles Mackintosh. Three days later he was dead.
On the evening of Sunday, May 10, the Lemmons and a few friends were playing the parlor game "Murder," while Manookian, who had been depressed for days, sulked in his room. It is hard to believe that the artist had told his friends many of the details of his early life, or they might never have played "Murder" so lightly. Members of the Lemmon family have stated that he was in love with Belinda, the flirtatious first wife of his friend Cyril. It will never be known for certain if this was true, or whether there were any other personal complications that drove him over the edge. Admirers of his Hawaiian figures have noticed his sensual treatment of men's bodies and suggested that he might have been gay or bisexual, but there are no anecdotes to substantiate this idea. The records of a police inquest into the death by Detective John Cluney vanished years ago. While the game went on in the living room, the distraught artist drank poison. He may have taken arsenic, but more likely he took cyanide. Cyanide had been in the news a few months before, as the agent of death in the suicide of Lewers and Cooke heir Will Lewers. Manookian's friends heard him cry out as he stumbled into Lemmon's kitchen, never to regain consciousness.
Manookian's art had celebrated adventure and heroic myths, yet he killed himself pointlessly and created a world of pain for those he left in the present. A simple way of explaining Manookian today would be to say he was manic-depressive. That would be too simple, as it ignores the terror that Tateos had to comprehend as a boy. Perhaps the words of the Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan, the martyred principal of Manookian's boyhood school echoed in Arman's soul: "The Armenian nation wept and roared in me." In April of 1931, Manookian's mother, sister and brother were shocked when they received letters of condolence from artists Verna Tallman and Cyril Lemmon. They read and re-read copies of the headlines about his death, which his brother Vahe, a photoengraver, carefully copied onto plates in his grief. They petitioned the American Embassy to retrieve his belongings, but were told that Arman had left nothing behind. Their main consolation, since they could not afford to go to Honolulu, was a visit by Manookian's friend Cyril Lemmon who came to Paris in 1932, separated from his wife, and making a stab at being a painter. They also received a painting and a few drawings sent by Verna Tallman which his sister-in-law Andree still treasures. The family did not have the financial means to attend the Memorial Exhibit for Manookian which was held at the Honolulu Academy in the Fall of 1933. Mc Clellan was away from Hawaii at the time of his friend's death, and no article or mention of Manookian's death was ever to appear in "Leatherneck" where his career had started. Had Manookian lived he would have had to cope with the disappointment of knowing that the massive history he illustrated for McClellan was never published. The Depression made publication of such a large book unfeasible, and McClellan resorted to mimeographing sections, chapter by chapter. The only complete record of the "History of U. S. Marines and Origin of Sea Soldiers" by Edwin North McClellan, illustrated by A. T. Manookian, exists on microfilm as recorded by the New York Public Library in 1954. Mc Clellan retired from the Marines in1936, continuing to edit "Paradise of the Pacific" until his departure from Hawaii not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It must have been wrenching for him to hear of the carnage at Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Arizona on which he had served as a young man. Like all Americans, at the War's end he must have also been stunned by the emerging details of the Holocaust. Had Manookian lived, he, like all Armenians would have known that his family had lived through the rehearsal for the genocide in Germany. While Manookian never lived to know the full impact of his work, McClellan was able to have his achievements recognized during his lifetime. In 1968 he was honored at a ceremony at the Philadelphia Naval Base where General Leonard Chapman called his history "the essential starting point for any meaningful research into our past." One has to wonder if Major McClellan ever looked through the box of Manookian illustrations in his office and remembered the young clerk with big ears he had met in 1924. When Mc Clellan died in 1971 at the age of eighty-nine, it had been decades since the proud young artist who had blossomed in Hawaii told a reporter, in a 1928 interview, that the underlying principles of his work were "those adapted by every earnest painter since (Michel)Angelo and Rubens." Manookian, when he gave that interview in 1928, had only three years left to live. He was already carefully aligning himself with the past and its rose-colored myths. His broken childhood had taught him not to trust the future, even in paradise.
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