Catalogue Entry
![[Portrait of David Burliuk], c. 1931, D1539. Verso: Unidentified restaurant menu](https://cdn.panopticoncr.com/arshgor001/catalogue_images/verso_sm/sneekhpa/R090542-003-1-1.jpg)
Verso not inscribed
Commentary
The drawing is a portrait of the Ukrainian artist David Burliuk (1882–1967). Soon after arriving in New York in 1924, Gorky met and befriended Burliuk who had studied art in Odessa, Moscow, Munich, and Paris, before immigrating to New York in 1922, after a four-year-long flight from revolutionary Russia. The two remained close friends until Gorky's death in July 1948.
The drawing is on the back of a menu dated Wednesday, June 10, 1931, presumably sketched while the two men dined together at this unidentified restaurant. In the words of the artist Balcomb Greene (1904–1990), "in order to approach a canvas, [Gorky] first had to feel a superhuman adroitness. The hours of laborious and frenzied drawing, alone in his studio, often in company on a thousand tablecloths and a thousand menus, were principally exercises in feeling his facility."1
1. Balcomb Greene, unpublished article, January 1951, Arshile Gorky Research Collection (1936–1993), Francis Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.