Reverse, on canvas: Gorky / 1930–36
Commentary
For two weeks in August 1941, the San Francisco Museum of Art was the venue for Gorky's first solo museum show. All but three of the twenty-one works on view were oil paintings and most came directly from the artist's studio. Two paintings were similarly titled and related compositionally. The painting, Xhorkom, is the slightly larger and more colorful of the two, while its mate, which is believed to be the earlier work, is titled Image in Khorkom (P147).
Khorkom (also spelled Khorgom, now known as Dilkaya, Turkey) is the name of the village in the Ottoman Empire where Gorky was born. Since Gorky maintained throughout his life that he was born in Russia, the spelling variation for this painting may be a nod to the Russian spelling of the village: Хорком.
In 1966, the Estate of Arshile Gorky exchanged the painting with Martha Jackson Gallery for Enigma (P120).
Gorky often backdated his paintings, which he seems to have done when he dated this painting 1935 for his show at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1941. He also frequently reworked the same canvas over many years. Here, the date inscribed on the reverse of the original canvas, "1930–1936," could refer to an earlier iteration of the painting. Stylistically, it is more likely that the painting was completed in 1936, as the date inscribed on the front suggests. Curiously, Ethel Schwabacher, Gorky's former student who went on to write the artist's first monograph, told Whitney curator Lloyd Goodrich, while he was preparing the artist's Memorial exhibition in 1951, the very specific information that Gorky completed the painting in January 1938.