Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné
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Catalogue Entry

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Photo: Edward C. Robison III
D0967
(Schary's Orchard)
1942
Ink and crayon on blue paper
11 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. (29.8 x 39.4 cm)
Recto, in green crayon, lower right: A. Gorky
Verso not inscribed
Private collection
Exhibitions
1955c New York possibly
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, Drawings for Principal Paintings by Gorky, September 26–October 22, 1955.
1986 Hempstead
Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, Jung and Abstract Expressionism: The Collective Image among Individual Voices, November 2–December 14, 1986, ill. in b/w, fig. 12, p. 14, as "Schary's Orchard".
1992–93b New York
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 20th Century Masters on Paper, December 10, 1992–January 23, 1993, ill. in b/w, as "Schary's Orchard".
2003–04b New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, November 20, 2003–February 15, 2004, no. 67, ill. in color, p. 131; p. 243, as "Schary's Orchard," dated c. 1942. Traveled to: Menil Collection, Houston, March 5–May 9, 2004.
2009–10 Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, October 15, 2009–January 10, 2010. (Exhibition catalogue: Taylor 2009a), pl. 100, ill. in color, p. 262; p. 389, as "Schary's Orchard," [exhibited in Philadelphia only]. Traveled to: Tate Modern, London, February 10–May 3, 2010 (Gale 2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 6–September 20, 2010 (Gale 2010).
2023–24 Greenwich
Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Greenwich, Connecticut, Connecticut Modern: Art, Style, and the Avant-Garde, 1930–1960, September 23, 2023–January 7, 2024.
Notes
The verso inscription information is known from a photograph provided by the owner.

Commentary

In early August 1942, Gorky and his wife Agnes "Mougouch" (1921–2013) spent several weeks at the home of the artist Saul Schary (1904–1978) in New Milford, Connecticut.1

Schary, who Gorky had known since 1927, recalled working on landscapes en plein air with Gorky, who eventually "made a beautiful drawing of [his] apple orchard, where he sat right among the trees [likely D0967]."2 Of the visit, Mougouch later wrote, “we spent 2 [weeks] in the country away from N.Y. [last summer] and during those two weeks Gorky did some very inspiring drawings from nature which have given him great impetus in his work and something quite new and miraculous is resulting. . . ."3 

This is the only drawing of an apple orchard that is known to have been in Schary's collection. It is the earliest dated work in Gorky's "apple orchard" series (D0967, D0972, and P270), which he continued to develop through the mid-1940s (see P270).

1. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, August 2, 1942, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York. Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, August 2, 1942, in Matthew Spender, ed., Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents, trans. Father Krikor Maksoudian (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), 159–60, 268–69.

2. Saul Schary, interview by Karlen Mooradian, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Saul Schary, "Conversations on Gorky," interview by Karlen Mooradian, October 5, 1965, The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky (Chicago: Gilgamesh, 1980), 203.

3. Letter from Mougouch Gorky to Nathalie Campbell, February 1943, in Spender, ed., The Plow and the Song, 278.

Related Work

Theme: Landscape

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