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Commentary
According to Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky (1921–2013), during the period in which this work was created, "Ethel Schwabacher wanted Gorky to paint her portrait. I think this was a sketch done on top of an old canvas, and abandoned. He never did the portrait."1
The portrait's subject, the American painter Ethel Kremer (1903–1984; m. Schwabacher), met Gorky in New York in 1928. Between January 1934 and 1935, their friendship grew as she and fellow patron Mina Boehm Metzger (1877–1975) shared private lessons with the artist, meeting at his 36 Union Square studio three afternoons a week for three hours. Ethel and her husband Wolfgang Schwabacher (m. 1935; 1898–1951) remained devoted patrons of Gorky's work throughout their lives. In 1957, Ethel published the first monograph on Gorky.2
Although the title is identified as lifetime in Jim M. Jordan's catalogue raisonné, there is no known extant documentation confirming its origin with the artist and we have therefore designated it as posthumous.3
1. Agnes Gorky Fielding, as quoted in Jim M. Jordan, "Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings," in Jim M. Jordan and Robert Goldwater, The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue (New York and London: New York University Press, 1982), 419.
2. Ethel Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky (New York: The Macmillan Company for the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957).
3. Jordan, 419.