Catalogue Entry

Commentary

The painting's first owner was Melanie Thompson (1885–1972), a high school teacher who studied with Gorky for approximately ten years beginning in 1927 or 1928. In a detailed resumé that the artist prepared for his first exhibition at the Guild Art Gallery in December 1935, Gorky includes her name—as "Miss Melina Thompson, N.Y."—among the collectors of his work.¹ 

The painting was likely one of seven Gorky works that were destroyed in a plane crash on March 1, 1962. The shipment of paintings and drawings had been consigned by Allan Stone Gallery in New York, and was destined for a solo exhibition in Los Angeles, organized by Everett Ellin Gallery. The American Airlines passenger flight took off from New York International Airport at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport), crashing into Jamaica Bay shortly after takeoff.

Correspondence between the two galleries lists four paintings from the 1930s and three drawings, one from 1932 and two from the mid-1940s, that were included in the shipment, although details on the individual works are sparse.²

This painting, which is described as "Picasso woman, 1932, oil," had been acquired by Stone from Thompson. 

For over a decade—between c. 1927 and 1942—Gorky studied and emulated the lessons of Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) oeuvre: his early twentieth-century explorations into Primitive art; complex arrangements of cubism; simplified still lifes of the early 1920s; neoclassical turn of the interwar period; and biomorphic forms that began in the later 1920s and continued into the following decade. Though Picasso's influence is clear in a number of works, such as this one, Gorky almost never directly copied a painting by the artist. 

1. Guild Art Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

2. Correspondence between Everett Ellin and Allan Stone, dating from February 1962, and, in particular, a letter dated February 22, 1962, from Ellin to Stone confirming their recent telephone conversation about a painting of a "Picasso-like woman" and an "early still life" (P395). Allan Stone Gallery records, 1960-2019. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.