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Reverse, center stretcher bar: 1932–33
Commentary
The painting's lifetime title, Composition, is that by which it was shown in Gorky's debut solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1941.1
Gorky often backdated his paintings and also frequently reworked the same canvas over many years. Here, the date inscribed on the original stretcher bar, "1932–33," could refer to an earlier iteration of the painting. Stylistically, it is more likely that the painting was completed in 1936–37. It should be noted, however, that when the work was shown in 1951 as part of Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, the date 1932–33 was given.
Isobel (1904–1995) and I[sadore] Donald Grossman (c. 1893–1980), the first owners of the painting, visited Gorky's studio at 36 Union Square around March 1937 and purchased three paintings directly from the artist (P052, P067, and P174). Their introduction to Gorky was made through I. Donald's brother-in-law Sidney Janis (1896–1989), who later became one of the postwar era's most important art dealers and represented the Estate of Arshile Gorky shortly after he opened his New York gallery in 1948.
Recalling their purchase, Isobel Grossman later wrote: "Gorky's studio was large and empty of all but the painter's necessities. The floors were scrupulously clean, and the walls very high and white. . . . He had carefully arranged two folding chairs for the best possible viewing. . . . He described his method of working out ideas and problems in many drawings before transferring them to canvas. . . . A few days later Gorky arrived at our apartment with the three paintings [we had bought]. All at once the room became transformed and we drank champagne to celebrate the great event."2
In a letter to his sister Vartoosh Mooradian (née Adoian; 1906–1991), dated March 23, 1937, Gorky presents a differing account of the event: "[Wednesday] evening the brother-in-law of Mr. Cianovich [sic] [Sidney Janis/Janovitch] and his wife came here and they liked my three paintings a lot but we couldn't come to an agreement about the price. They said that they'll come back and somehow we'll make a deal. . . . [T]he others [collectors] flutter likewise."3
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, such as this one, Gorky almost never directly copied a painting by the artist.
1. Typed shipping manifest, August 5, 1941, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives. San Francisco Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky, August 9–24, 1941. No catalogue.
2. Isobel Grossman, "If Memory Serves," in Arshile Gorky: Drawings to Paintings, exh. cat. (Austin, T.X.: University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin, 1975), 12.
3. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, March 23, 1937, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York; Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, March 23, 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), 150–51, 150.
After works by other artists: Pablo Picasso
