Verso not inscribed
Verso, in pencil, upper right [not in artist's hand]: Levy 9094 [sideways]
The verso inscription information and marking are known from a photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Commentary
The drawing is a detail after a black-and-white photograph of Gorky and his mother Shushan der Marderosian Adoian (1880–1919) (see supplementary image). The photograph was taken c. 1912 and was intended as a memento for the artist's father Setrag Adoian (c. 1871–1948) who had immigrated to the United States in 1906 and to whom it was sent.
The date in the lower right corner of the drawing, which the artist most likely inscribed in charcoal pencil, is indistinct and has been interpreted as "1926" or "1936." Given that Gorky is known to have worked on the related painting The Artist and His Mother (P115) between c. 1926 and 1936, either date is plausible for the drawing. In a letter to his younger sister Vartoosh Mooradian (née Adoian; 1906–1991) dated April 18, 1938, however, Gorky writes, "I've made a very wonderful drawing of mother in charcoal, putting a great deal of time into it. It came out very well."1 As the only drawing of the artist's mother rendered in charcoal, this is undoubtedly the drawing to which he is referring; therefore, the latter date of 1936 seems more probable. It should also be noted that Gorky often backdated his works. When he loaned the drawing to the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1941, as Portrait of My Mother, he gave it the erroneous date of 1921.2
According to Gorky scholar Melvin P. Lader, of the two painted versions of The Artist and His Mother (P114 and P115), Gorky's rendering of his mother's eyes, lips, and mouth in the drawing are closest to her likeness in P115.3 Since this painting is presumed to have been finished by c. 1934, and definitely by 1937 (see commentary for P115), Lader argues that the "drawing was not a study for the painting, as generally assumed, but was itself fashioned upon the already completed canvas which was still in Gorky's studio."4
1. Letter from Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, April 18, 1938, Arshile Gorky/Mooradian Archive, Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, New York. Arshile Gorky to Vartoosh Mooradian, April 18, 1938, in Matthew Spender, ed., Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents, trans. Father Krikor Maksoudian (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), 159–60, 162.
2. Typed shipping manifest, August 5, 1941, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archives.
3. Melvin P. Lader, "Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother: Further Study of Its Evolution, Sources, and Meaning,"ARTS Magazine 58 (January 1984): 99.
4. Ibid.