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Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné

Catalogue Entry

D1097
[Drawing, They Will Take My Island]
1944
Graphite pencil and crayon on paper
22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)
Recto, in pencil, lower right: A. Gorky / 44
Verso not inscribed
Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 57.16.
Provenance
Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, possibly gift of the artist
Brooklyn Museum, New York (January 1, 1957)
Exhibitions
1957 Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum, New York, Golden Years of American Drawings, 1905–1956, January 22–March 17, 1957, ill. in b/w, p. 61; p. 22, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
1962 Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum, New York, Drawings from the Museum Collection, January 19–February 16, 1962.
1965b New York
Gallery of Modern Art, including Huntington Hartford Collection, New York, Major 19th and 20th Century Drawings, January 19–February 21, 1965.
1965c Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum, New York, Twelve Years of Collecting Drawings and Prints, 1953–1965, June 21–December 26, 1965, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
1969e New York
M. Knoedler & Co. Inc, New York, Gorky: Drawings, November 25–December 27, 1969. (Exhibition catalogue: Jordan 1969), no. 79, ill. in b/w, p. 38; p. 59, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
1972 Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum, New York, American Drawings from the Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, August 23–November 5, 1972, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
1977 New Brunswick
Rutgers University Art Gallery, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Surrealism and American Art, 1931–1947, March 5–April 24, 1977, no. 41, ill. in b/w, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
1981–82 New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Arshile Gorky 1904–1948: A Retrospective, April 24–July 19, 1981, no. 180, ill. in b/w, p. 205, as "Study for They Will Take My Island". Traveled to: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, September 12–November 6, 1981; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, December 3, 1981–February 28, 1982.
1989–90 Madrid
Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, Arshile Gorky, 1904–1948, October 17–December 23, 1989, no. 79, ill. in color, p. 148, as "Study for They Will Take My Island". Traveled to: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, January 19–March 25, 1990.
1995–96 Fort Worth / Buffalo
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (organizers), Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years, 1995–96, no. 32, ill. in color, p. 153, as "Study for They Will Take My Island". Traveled to: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 7–September 17, 1995; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, October 13–December 31, 1995; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, January 13–March 17, 1996.
2001–03 Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum, New York, Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940–1960, October 12, 2001–January 6, 2002. Traveled to: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 16–May 12, 2002; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, June 21–September 15, 2002; Phoenix Art Museum, April 4–January 29, 2003.
2009–10 Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, October 15, 2009–January 10, 2010. (Exhibition catalogue: Taylor 2009a), pl. 123, ill. in color, p. 284; p. 390, as "Study for They Will Take My Island," [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).
Literature
Mellow 1957
J.R.M. [James R. Mellow]. "In the Galleries." Arts Magazine (New York) 31, no. 5 (February 1957), ill. in b/w, p. 52, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
Reiff 1961
Reiff, Robert F. "A Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky's Art from 1943–1948." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1961, fig. 75, ill. in b/w, p. 353, as "They Will Take My Island".
Johnson 1964
Johnson, Una E. Drawings of the Masters: 20th Century Drawings. Part II: 1940 to Present. New York: Shorewood Publishers, 1964, pl. 49, as "Study for painting, "They Will Take My Island"".
Joyner 1969
Joyner, Brooks. The Drawings of Arshile Gorky. College Park: University of Maryland, 1969. Exhibition catalogue (1969 College Park), fig. 27, ill. in b/w, p. 41, as "They Will Take My Island".
Freedman 1981
Freedman, Adele. "An Artist's Descent into Death: Gorky's Early Years Were Chaotic, His Later Ones Were Even Worse." The Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 9, 1981, ill. in b/w, p. 15, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
Lader 1985
Lader, Melvin P. Arshile Gorky. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985. Monograph, fig. 86, ill. in b/w, p. 88, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
Brooklyn Museum 1988
Masterpieces in the Brooklyn Museum. New York: The Brooklyn Museum, in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988, no. 146, ill. in color, p. 194, as "Study for They Will Take My Island".
Van Hensbergen 2004
Van Hensbergen, Gijs. Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004, ill. in b/w, p. 159, as "Study for "They Will Take My Island"".
FitzGerald 2006b
FitzGerald, Michael. "Picasso and American Art: Chapter Four (1940–1949)." In Picasso and American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006. Exhibition catalogue, fig. 90, ill. in color, p. 227; discussed p. 230, as "Study for "They Will Take My Island"".
Notes
The verso inscription information is known from the records of the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Commentary

The drawing's overall composition is directly related to Gorky's painting of the same year, They Will Take My Island (see P288), from which its title derives.

The drawing was likely created at Crooked Run Farm during Gorky’s second summer there in 1944. In early May that year, the Gorky family left New York and returned to Crooked Run—the rural Lincoln, Virginia, home of Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky's (1921–2013) parents Esther (1896–1990) and John H. Magruder II (1889–1963)—this time staying for close to six months. It proved another creatively productive period for Gorky, who wrote to his younger sister, “I have drawn many new drawings which are among my best.”1 He was again captivated by his surroundings: the tall grasses, thistles, milkweed, and ragweed; reportedly lamenting, when the fields were mown, “they are cutting down the Raphaels.”2 The barn on the property, which Gorky temporarily repurposed as a studio, was populated with a collection of dried horse bones, “old rusty farm implements,” “bits of machinery,” and haystacks.3

The drawing's first confirmed owner, the artist and gallerist Betty Parsons (1900–1982), met Gorky as a "friend and admirer" in 1938.4 In 1941, Parsons enrolled in his wartime "Camouflage" course at the Grand Central School of Art in New York, which convened twice weekly until mid-1942. She later recalled, “there were about 20 to 30 students in the class and they admired [Gorky]. I was in the class about three, maybe six months. And then after that, [Gorky and I] organized a drawing class together in my studio on [East] 40th street. . . . He was very anti-facility. As soon as you started to indicate that you were becoming familiar with what you were doing, he would switch you. ‘Now, drop that and start this,’ he’d say.”5

1. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, c. 1944, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, c. 1944, 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), 307.

2. Arshile Gorky, as quoted in letter from Mougouch Gorky to Jeanne Reynal, Summer 1944, in Spender, ed., The Plow and the Song, 309.

3. Letter from Mougouch Gorky to Jeanne Reynal, November 1944, in ibid, 319-20.

4. Betty Parsons, interview by Karlen Mooradian, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Betty Parsons, "Conversations on Gorky," interview by Karlen Mooradian, May 9, 1967, The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky (Chicago: Gilgamesh, 1980), 188.

5. Ibid.

Related Work
They Will Take My Island1944 P288
They Will Take My Island
1944
Oil on canvas
P288
Oil on canvas