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Verso, stamped, upper left: Galleria dell'Obelisco / N. / Via Sistina a 146 - Roma; in red ink: 19 [in triangle]; in ink: G.[aspero] dal Corso
Verso, in pencil, upper left [not in artist's hand]: 12 [circled and upside down]; upper right: 229
The verso inscription information and marking are known from photographs provided by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Commentary
The drawing's overall composition is directly related to Gorky's posthumously titled canvas, Last Painting (see related work), dated to 1948, and from which its title derives.
The drawing was likely created at Crooked Run Farm during Gorky’s third and final summer there in 1946.1 In late July that year, the Gorky family, including daughters Maro (b. 1943) and Natasha (b. 1945), left New York for 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). Notwithstanding the destruction, by fire, of the barn which Gorky had repurposed as a temporary studio on the property, as well as his ongoing recovery from a colostomy operation in March, the extended summer of 1946—from mid-July to early November—proved his most productive spell yet. As the artist reported to his younger sister Vartoosh (m. Mooradian; 1906–1991), shortly before the family’s return to New York from Virginia: “this summer I finished a lot of drawings, 292 of them. Never have I been able to do so much work, and they are good too.”2
1. The family also visited for extended summer stays in 1943 and 1944.
2. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, November 17, 1946, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, November 17, 1946, 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), 406.
