Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné
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© Image courtesy the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
P406
[Study for an Unrealized Mural, Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn]
1935
Oil and photographic collage on canvas (?)
Dimensions unknown
Neither front nor reverse seen
Presumed destroyed
Literature
Schwabacher 1957
Schwabacher, Ethel. Arshile Gorky. Introduction by Meyer Schapiro. New York: The Macmillan Company for the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957. Monograph, fig. 33, ill. in b/w (detail), as "Collage study for Newark Airport Murals".
Rand 1981
Rand, Harry. Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun & Co. Publishers Inc., and London: George Prior Associated Publishers Ltd., 1981. Monograph, fig. 3–7, ill. in b/w, p. 37, as "Sketch of a mural proposed for a public building, designed under the direction of the WPA," n.d.
Rand 1991
Rand, Harry. Arshile Gorky: The Implication of Symbols. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Monograph, fig. 3–7, ill. in b/w, pp. 42–43, as "Sketch of a mural proposed for a public building, designed under the direction of the WPA," n.d.
Patterson 2020
Patterson, Jody. Modernism for the Masses: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in 1930s New York. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020, fig. 49, ill. in b/w, p. 111, as "Mechanical Aspects of Airplane Construction," dated 1936.
Notes

Commentary

The study is only known from a black-and-white reproduction in the Whitney Museum of American Art Archives.1 Its medium and support are listed in accordance with their earliest-known description in Ethel Schwabacher's 1957 monograph on Gorky.2 It is one of only two known preparatory works that Gorky created specifically for his unrealized mural commission for the Administration Building at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York (D1618 and P406).

Awarded in August 1935, Floyd Bennett was Gorky's first assignment as a member of the Mural Division in the Works Progress Administration's newly established Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). Under the assignment, he was to create a single aviation-themed panel, measuring approximately 720 square feet, for the building's interior. According to Burgoyne Diller (1906–1965), director of the Mural Division in New York (1935–40), the final proposal was conceived as a "montage of photo-enlargements and paintings," incorporating select photographs of airplanes and airports by the photographer Wyatt Davis (1906–1984) whom Gorky had known since 1927.3 Gorky submitted preliminary designs for the project by December 1935.

Although both Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981), director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Holger Cahill (1887–1960), national director of the FAP, advocated for Gorky's proposal, the commission was ultimately awarded to Eugene Chodorow (1910–2000). In January 1936, Gorky was reassigned to the Administration Building at Newark Airport in New Jersey, where he completed a ten-panel mural cycle. His final designs for Newark stemmed, in large part, from his earlier designs for the Floyd Bennett Field proposal, but no longer incorporated the photographs of Wyatt Davis. The finished Newark murals were unveiled to the public in June 1937 (see P141).

1. Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, Arshile Gorky Research Collection, Box 4, Newark Airport Murals.

2. Ethel Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky (New York: The Macmillan Company for the Whitney Museum of American Art), 1957, p. 79.

3. Letter from Burgoyne Diller to Wolfgang and Ethel Schwabacher, c. November 1949, Arshile Gorky Research Collection (1936–1993), Francis Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; see also: Ruth Bowman, Murals without Walls: Arshile Gorky’s Aviation Murals Rediscovered, exh. cat. (Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1978), 24.

Related Work

Theme: Mural

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