Catalogue Entry

Commentary

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.