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Reverse: 1929–30 Gorky
The inscription on the reverse is known from the Arshile Gorky Research Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, New York.
On loan: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1946–1948.
Commentary
An earlier state of the painting is known from a photograph in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art Archives (see supplementary image).1 Gorky often returned to the same canvas numerous times, however, little documentation exists of his reworkings. In this instance, the archival photograph provides rare documentary evidence of the artist's later additions, most notable in the several changes to the forms near the composition's center.
The painting's first owner, the artist Jeanne Reynal (1903–1983), met Gorky in New York in June 1941 at a dinner party hosted by their mutual friend Margaret "Peggy" Osborn (1896–1983). The following day, Reynal visited Gorky's studio and purchased two paintings, likely this painting and P147.2 Reynal would remain a close friend and devoted supporter of Gorky's work throughout her life.
Shortly after the visit, Gorky wrote to his younger sister Vartoosh Mooradian (née Adoian; 1906–1991), reporting: "A few days ago one of my dear and kind friends came here, an artist, and my paintings pleased her a great deal, and she bought one [sic] and immediately gave me 500 dollars. And she invited all of us out there [to San Francisco], to paint there this summer. It would be really wonderful, it's been sixteen years [sic] since I've been out of New York, and as you know my friends here have no longer given me 25–50 dollars for a painting."3
Gorky accepted Reynal's invitation to visit her on the West Coast, where she was living at the time, with the promise of a place in which he could work and the prospect of an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, facilitated by her. On July 2nd, Gorky, Agnes "Mougouch" Magruder (m. Gorky; 1921–2013) and their friend, the artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), drove cross-country from New York to California where Gorky was to prepare for what would prove to be his first solo museum exhibition. For two weeks, beginning on August 9th, the museum exhibited twenty-one works by the artist. All but three were oil paintings and most came directly from his studio. The painting's lifetime title, Still Life, originates from an archival shipping manifest for the exhibition.4
For over a decade—between c. 1927 and 1942—Gorky studied and emulated the lessons of Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) oeuvre: his early twentieth-century explorations into Primitive art; complex arrangements of Cubism; simplified still lifes of the early 1920s; neoclassical turn of the interwar period; and biomorphic forms that began in the later 1920s and continued into the following decade. Though Picasso's influence is clear in a number of works, Gorky almost never directly copied a painting by the artist.
1. Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, Arshile Gorky Research Collection, Box 4.
2. Agnes Gorky Fielding, interview by Matthew Spender, September 24–October 6, 1991, transcript, 3, Matthew Spender Papers, AGF Archives.
3. According to Mougouch Gorky, Reynal purchased two paintings; ibid. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, June 23, 1941, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, June 23, 1941, 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), 226.
4. Typed shipping manifest, August 5, 1941, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives.
