Catalogue Entry

Commentary

The drawing was created in early August 1942, when 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."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 drawing and D0967 are the earliest dated works in Gorky's Apple Orchard series (see related work), 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.