Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné

Catalogue Entry

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Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art, Shiga

P265

(Untitled [Virginia Landscape])

c. 1943–44

Oil on canvas

34 x 46 in. (86.4 x 116.8 cm)

Front not inscribed
Reverse, center stretcher bar: A. Gorky

Shiga Museum of Art, Japan

Provenance

Estate of Arshile Gorky (1948)

[Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (October 11, 1952)]

Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer, Baltimore (December 17, 1956)

Baltimore Museum of Art, by gift (1956)

Harold Diamond, New York (June 5, 1963)

Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation (June 1963)

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., by gift (1966)

[Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, Part I, November 10, 1986, lot 15; bought in] . . .

William Beadleston Inc., New York (by May 1988)

Seibu Department Stores Ltd., Tokyo

Gendai Hanga Kobo Co. Ltd. / Nantenshi Gallery, Tokyo (c. 1988)

Museum of Modern Art [now Shiga Museum of Art], Shiga, Japan (1988)

Exhibitions

1953b New York

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, Arshile Gorky in the Final Years, February 16–March 14, 1953, no. 9, as "Untitled," dated 1946.

1957 Baltimore

Baltimore Museum of Art, Modern Art for Baltimore, February 23–March 17, 1957, as "Untitled".

1960 Berkeley

University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, Art from Ingres to Pollock: Painting and Sculpture since Neoclassicism, March 6–April 3, 1960, ill. in b/w, p. 55, as "Untitled".

1979 Washington, D.C.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Arshile Gorky: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, October 4–November 25, 1979, no. 23, ill. in b/w, p. 37; p. 45, as "Untitled (Virginia Landscape)," dated c. 1944.

1996 Nagoya

Aichi Prefectural Museum, Nagoya, Japan, Abstract Expressionism, July 26–September 16, 1996, no. 18, ill. in color, p. 69, as "Untitled (Virginia Landscape)". Traveled to: Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, June 6–July 14, 1996; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan, September 29–November 17, 1996.

1997 Tokyo

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Founders and Heirs of the New York School, January 25–March 16, 1997, no. 16, ill. in color, p. 66, as "Untitled (Virginia Landscape)". Traveled to: Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai, Japan, April 5–May 25, 1997; Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, Japan, June 28–August 3, 1997.

Literature

Sidney Janis Gallery 1957

33 Paintings by Arshile Gorky. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1957. Exhibition catalogue (1957f New York), no. 38, ill. in b/w (in situ), as "Gallery View, Gorky Exhibition, February 1953".

Baltimore Museum of Art 1959

Baltimore Museum of Art. "Toward a Definition of Abstract Expressionism." Foreword by Israel Rosen. Baltimore Museum of Art News 22, no. 3 (February 1959), ill. in b/w, p. 9, as "Untitled".

Jordan 1982a

Jordan, Jim M. "The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: New Discoveries, New Sources, and Chronology." 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, discussed pp. 82–83, as "Virginia Landscape".

Jordan 1982b

Jordan, Jim M. "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, no. 265, ill. in b/w, p. 414, as "N.T. Virginia Landscape".

Lader 1985

Lader, Melvin P. Arshile Gorky. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985. Monograph, fig. 76, ill. in b/w, p. 80, as "Untitled (Virginia Landscape)".

Rand 1986

Rand, Harry. "Gorky In Virginia." Arts in Virginia 26, no. 1 (1986), fig. 13, ill. in b/w, p. 12, as "Untitled (Virginia Landscape)".

Ades 1997

Ades, Dawn. Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Margherita Andreotti, ed. Chicago and New York: Art Institute of Chicago and Thames and Hudson, 1997, fig. 143, ill. in b/w, p. 143, as "Virginia Landscape".

Herrera 2003

Herrera, Hayden. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, fig. 154, ill. in color, as "Untitled".

Notes

Front, lower right [by Agnes Gorky Phillips]: A Gorky / [paraph]

The reverse is covered by a backing board. The inscription on the stretcher bar is known from the records of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Commentary

In July 1943, the Gorkys left New York with their three-month-old daughter Maro and took up residence in the recently acquired Lincoln, Virginia, home of Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky's parents, Esther (1896–1990) and John H. Magruder II (1889–1963). The young family enjoyed an extended stay at Crooked Run Farm, as it was known, in large part because Gorky was so taken with his natural surroundings. By November, when they returned to New York, Gorky had created over one hundred pencil and crayon drawings. The painting's overall composition is closely referenced in several known drawings (see related work).

According to Mougouch (1921–2013), Gorky "immediately liked Virginia. . . . He arrived with no paints and no easel, as we couldn't fit much into the car. All he took were wax crayons and watercolors and buckets of paper. And that's what he feverishly worked on all summer. He cleaned up the barn and decorated it with old horse bones that he found in the fields. It was the first time that he saw the seasons in America come and go."¹As Mougouch later explained to a friend, the 110-acre farm and its enveloping landscape were a revelation to Gorky: "He was again a small child . . . and his vision was clear and untrammeled by habit. He made only drawings. . . . A drawing is more direct and automatic, or should be, to have the lyrical freshness that a drawing should have, like a poem. . . . This summer was the real release of Gorky. He was able to discover himself and what he has done is to create a world of his own but a world equal to nature with the infinite complexities of nature and yet sweet, secretive and playful as nature is."²

In an April 1944 article for Harper's Bazaar, the Museum of Modern Art curator James Johnson Sweeney (1900–1986) wrote of how the artist had "look[ed] into the grass" that summer, in practice and spirit, resulting in a "freshness and personalization of idiom which Gorky had never previously approached, and a new vocabulary of forms on which he is at present drawing for a group of large oil paintings."³

The painting is an early example of Gorky's use of a liner brush, the long-haired, fine-tipped paintbrush preferred by sign painters for making extremely thin lines of uniform weight. As a teenager, Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) learned about this tool while apprenticed to a decorating firm in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and takes credit for introducing it to Gorky. As de Kooning later recalled, Gorky was frustrated by not being able to transfer the delicate lines of his drawings into the compositions of his paintings with the large brushes he was using. "Once he bought [a liner brush], de Kooning remembers, Gorky spent the day in ecstasy painting long thin lines."⁴

1. Cosima Spender, interview with Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky Fielding, in Tate Etc. (Issue 18: Spring 2010), https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-18-spring-2010/my-gorky.

2. Letter from Mougouch Gorky to Nathalie Campbell, December 12, 1943, in Matthew Spender, ed., Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), 290.

3. James Johnson Sweeney, "Five American Painters," Harper's Bazaar (April 1944), reprinted in Ethel Schwabacher, "Arshile Gorky," in Arshile Gorky Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat. (New York: Plantin Press, 1951), 30.

4. Hayden Herrera adds that the artist Gabor Peterdi (1915–2001) also took credit for introducing the liner brush to Gorky. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 434. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 105. See also: Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, The Time, The Idea (New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 68; William Seitz, "IV: Nature (c. 1942–48)," in Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 34–5.