Reverse not inscribed
Reverse, in pencil, on a section of the canvas folded around the upper stretcher bar [possibly in artist's hand]: CHARRED BELOVed; in pencil, on vertical stretcher bar: Charred Beloved [sideways]
The reverse inscription information and marking are known from a photograph provided by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Commentary
Shortly after Gorky's studio in Sherman, Connecticut, was destroyed by fire in mid-January 1946, the art collectors Kathrin (1900–1984) and Walter Hochschild (1900–1983) offered him use of the ballroom in their penthouse apartment located at 1200 Fifth Avenue. In this temporary studio, Gorky created four paintings (P305, P306, P307, and P371), three of which were sent to Julien Levy Gallery in New York, where they were exhibited that April.1 This painting is the second work on the checklist: Charred Beloved No. 2. It was titled by Gorky in anticipation of Levy's exhibition, likely through a collaborative process of free association which he and André Breton (1896–1966) had experimented with a year earlier (see commentary for P287). The painting's overall composition is closely reference in one known drawing (see D1203).
The devastating studio fire was unexpectedly liberating for the artist as Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky (1921–2013) later explained. "The fire was awful, breathtaking, but I have never seen Gorky so strong, so calm, so free as he was that next day. The studio was destroyed but the paintings, he said, were all in him. He would make better ones."2 Gorky himself would later comment, "sometimes it is very good to have everything cleaned out like that, and be forced to begin again."3
Writing to a friend in early February about the unusual situation, Mougouch noted: "Gorky is working very hard. I send him off in the morning with his lunch pail so that he won't have to come down from his tower until dark. Surely the only man who goes off to work in a penthouse ballroom toting his lunch in a little black pail—a sky miner—He's strangely happy. The Ballroom will do till we find something else—its very far—101st & 5th but the people have been very nice & leave him entirely to himself. . . ."4
1. Julien Levy Gallery, New York, Arshile Gorky: Paintings, April 9–May 4, 1946.
2. Agnes Gorky Phillips, "Unpublished Critique of Ethel Schwabacher's Biography," c. 1957, in Matthew Spender, ed., Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), 533; see also: Letter from Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky to Jeanne Reynal, late January 1946, in ibid, 372.
3. Arshile Gorky, as quoted in Talcott B. Clapp, "A Painter in a Glass House," Sunday Republican Magazine (February 29, 1948): 3.
4. Letter from Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky to Jeanne Reynal, February 5, 1946, in Spender, ed., 375.