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Reverse, stamped, lower stretcher bar: [FRE]DRIX / 8 [upside down]
The portrait head is on a separate piece of canvas that the artist affixed to a larger section to compose the painting.
The reverse inscription information is known from the records of the Arshile Gorky Foundation.
Commentary
The painting is a portrait of Gorky’s younger sister Vartoosh Mooradian (née Adoian; 1906–1991). For just over a year beginning in September 1935, Vartoosh, her husband Moorad (1896–1963), and their young son Karlen (1935–1990), lived with Gorky in his studio at 36 Union Square, before moving to Chicago. During their stay, Gorky made a pencil drawing of Vartoosh which he later mentions in a letter to her from late 1937: "from that [drawing] I have made four very magnificent oil paintings," of which this is one (see also P111 and P112; the fourth is unidentified).1 Gorky never succeeded in delivering these paintings to Vartoosh.
Although the title is identified as originating with the artist in Jim M. Jordan's catalogue raisonné, there is no known extant documentation confirming this and we have therefore designated it as posthumous.2
The painting was a gift to the Russian-American artist Raphael Soyer (1899–1987) whom Gorky met in the late 1920s. They became close friends in the early 1930s after Gorky moved his studio to 36 Union Square, which was just across the park from Soyer's own. About his receipt of the painting, Soyer later explained, "one day [Gorky and I] had a long talk. We used to talk an awful lot about art. We talked on art, about art, for some time in his studio. . . . And kind of impulsively he took out two little paintings—a self-portrait [P110] and a portrait of his sister [P113] and gave them to me. And I still have them."3
1. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, [September or December] 18, 1937, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York. Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, [Month unknown] 18, 1937, 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), 154, 156.
2. Jim M. Jordan, "Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings," in The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue, by Jim M. Jordan and Robert Goldwater (New York and London: New York University Press, 1982), 241.
3. Raphael Soyer, interview by Milton Brown, May 13–June 1, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.