Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné
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Catalogue Entry

D1505
(Virginia Landscape)
1944
Graphite pencil and crayon on paper
19 x 25 in. (48.3 x 63.5 cm)
Recto, in pencil, lower right: A. Gorky / 1944 / [paraph]
Verso not seen
Private collection
Exhibitions
1969 College Park
J. Millard Tawes Fine Arts Center, University of Maryland Art Department and Art Gallery, College Park, The Drawings of Arshile Gorky, March 20–April 27, 1969. (Exhibition catalogue: Joyner 1969), no. 23 (Drawings, Sketches, Gouaches), p. 53, as "Virginia Landscape".
Literature
Jordan 1976
Jordan, Jim M. "Arshile Gorky at Crooked Run Farm." Arts Magazine (New York) 50, no. 7 (March 1976), discussed pp. 101–102, as "Landscape Drawing".
Arts Magazine 1976b
[Correction to Jim M. Jordan's "Arshile Gorky at Crooked Run Farm" (March 1976)]. Arts Magazine (New York) 50, no. 10 (June 1976), ill. in b/w, p. 110, as "Landscape Drawing".
Rathbone 1978
Rathbone, Eliza E. "Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song." In American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1978. Exhibition catalogue, fig. 42, ill. in b/w, p. 82; fig. 43, ill. in b/w. (detail), p. 82, as "Virginia Landscape".
Notes

Commentary

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 was gifted to Mary (1918–2011) and Thomas Taylor (1911–2001) whose home neighbored Crooked Run. In late October 1944, when Mougouch was hospitalized for a medical procedure and their daughter, Maro (b. 1943), had gone to stay with her maternal grandparents in Washington D.C., Gorky remained in Virginia in order to continue working. The Taylors were kind enough to invite him to join them for dinner each night of the week that Agnes was away and, in gratitude, the artist gave them this drawing.4

The couple met Gorky in his studio at Crooked Run to receive their gift. He showed them the view through the door—a peach tree with fields in the distance—which had inspired him. In Mary's later recollection, Gorky had described the drawing to them as: "'almost realistic, a hay or straw rick, and lines like this appear in fields when they've been mowed, and this represents water, of which there was none in the field. This is trees, this is the peach tree branch. This is a landscape just because you have a horizon here. It looks as if there's sky.'"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. Jean McDonald, "Genius with a Wild and Tender Personality," The Loudon Times-Mirror (Leesburg, VA), October 11, 1962. 

5. Arshile Gorky, as quoted in Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press, 2000), 368.

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