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Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné

Catalogue Entry

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Photo: Paul Hester
P371
Charred Beloved No. 1
1946
Oil on canvas
50 x 38 in. (127 x 96.5 cm)
Front, lower left: A. Gorky / 46
Reverse not seen
Private collection
Provenance
The artist
Julien Levy Gallery, New York (February 1946)
Kenneth MacPherson, New York (April 1946)
Marco Carson, Flemington, New Jersey, by gift (c. 1947–50)
Harold Guy, Flemington, New Jersey, by descent (1986)
Estate of Harold Guy (1995) . . .
Private collection, likely by descent (c. 1996) . . .
Jason McCoy Inc., New York (c. 1996; by 2000)
Private collection (February 2007)
Exhibitions
1946b New York
Julien Levy Gallery, New York, Arshile Gorky: Paintings: 1946, April 9–May 4, 1946, no. 1, as Charred Beloved No. 1.
2009–10 Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, October 15, 2009–January 10, 2010. (Exhibition catalogue: Taylor 2009a), pl. 168, ill. in color, p. 331; p. 391, as "Charred Beloved III," [exhibited in Philadelphia only]. Traveled to: Tate Modern, London, February 10–May 3, 2010 (Gale 2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 6–September 20, 2010 (Gale 2010).
Literature
Herrera 2003
Herrera, Hayden. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, fig. 167, ill. in color, as "Charred Beloved III".
Beredjiklian 2007
Beredjiklian, Alexandre. Arshile Gorky: sept thèmes majeurs. Suresnes, France: Alphamédian & Johanet; Lisbon: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 2007. Monograph, discussed p. 55, as "Bien-aimée calcinée III".
Mattison 2009
Matttison, Robert S. Arshile Gorky: Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafica, 2009. Monograph, ill. in color, p. 111, as "Charred Beloved III".
Notes

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, P306P307, and P371), three of which were sent to Julien Levy Gallery, New York, where they were exhibited that April.1 This painting is the first work on the checklist: Charred Beloved No. 1. 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 GalleryNew YorkArshile Gorky: PaintingsApril 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 (ZurichHauser & 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., The Plow and the Song, 375.

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