Arshile Gorky

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena
Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, May 3, 1974, lot 505
Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in June 1974

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Special Exhibition for the College Art Association, January - April 1965
Irvine, University of California; Davis, University of California; Riverside, University of California; San Diego, The Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, A Selection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Works from the Hunts Foods and Industries Museum of Art Collection, March - September 1967, p. 35, illustrated
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Gorky: Drawings, November - December 1969, cat. no. 64, illustrated
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle; Bremen, Kunsthalle, Twentieth Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations, January - August 1976, cat. 82 (New York) and cat. no. 71 (Germany)
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948: A Retrospective, April 1981 - February 1982, cat. no. 134, illustrated
New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Master Drawings of the Twentieth Century, May - June 1998, pl. 16, p. 43, illustrated in color
New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art; Houston, The Menil Collection, Arshile Gorky:  A Retrospective of Drawings, November 2003 - May 2004, pl. 70, p. 135, illustrated in color

Ethel Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky, New York, 1957, pl. 40, p. 90, illustrated

This drawing is in good condition overall. Some time ago, the sheet was laid down to masonite, probably to address a repaired tear that was evident in the 1974 Sotheby's sale catalogue. The paper edges were trimmed to match the masonite sheet. The adhesive is not easily reversible so it is currently not possible to remove the sheet from the masonite. The 3 inch vertical tear extends up from the bottom edge, located 11 in. from the right edge, and appears to have self-adhesive tape on the reverse judging by slight discolorations along either side of the tear which have recently been toned down. Two additional small 1/8 in. tears are located to the left along the bottom edge. Contact with the masonite has caused a slight darkening of the paper overall, and a previous mat caused slight darkening along the left and right edges. This discoloration has recently been diminished and the paper tone evened overall. Paper losses at the tip of the upper left and lower right corners have been filled with matching paper. The upper right corner has a repaired ¼ in. tear and a slight ¼ in. stain, possibly from tape at the time of execution. The drawing is framed in a dark stained wood frame with gilded interior beveled edge under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

For many artists, drawing is the soul of the creative process, giving birth to new ideas through the intimate practice of putting pen to paper. For both the European Modernists of the early 20^th century and the younger generation of abstractionists in New York at mid-century, the freedom afforded by the act of drawing was essential to many artists, Arshile Gorky paramount among them. When Matta suggested to Gorky that he thin his pigments into veils of color, one of the motivations was to preserve the primacy of drawing in Gorky's art. His contemporaries prized the spontaneity of Gorky's draftsmanship and appreciated its indispensable role in his brilliant reinvention of form as metaphor and as subject matter. Gorky's artistic eye was finely attuned to line, as demonstrated by the lyrical and vibrant Housatonic from 1943, the most critical year in the artist's breakthrough to a style uniquely his own. This was the year that Gorky's deep love of nature coalesced with the many influences he absorbed, resulting in his mature style of abstracted biomorphic compositions that were a prescient precursor to the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning, among others.

Housatonic aptly demonstrates Gorky's unique historical position as an artist welcomed by the Surrealists, such as Andre Breton, and looked to as an interpreter of their manifesto by the American artists of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gorky's mature period as an artist, 1942-1946, exactly bridges the arrival of the exiled European Surrealists to New York and the beginning of American art's hegemony with de Kooning's black and white abstractions and Pollock's nascent drip technique of 1947-1949.  In particular, the works of Joan Miró can be seen as one of the most integral keys to Gorky's evolution. Miró's masterful balance of drawing and pigment within his paintings was formative to Gorky's work, and in the comparison between Miró's miraculous Constellation drawings and Gorky's Housatonic, their shared affinity for color, line, anthropomorphism and automatism is clear.

Landscape and nature were Gorky's touchstone for deep emotion, remembrance, loss and celebration. His breakthrough occurred during his summer 1943 visit to his in-laws in Virginia but his landscape-inspired visions were also based on visits to the Connecticut countryside, where he and his wife eventually took up residence. Gorky's family suffered through the Armenian tragedies during his childhood, but his heart was suffused with loving memories of his homeland's countryside and his family's garden. Seen through this emotional prism, the watery, biomorphic abstractions of 1943 reflect the Virginia and Connecticut landscape with exquisite color, poetic draftsmanship and compositional complexity. The Housatonic is a large New England river with secluded precipices and cascading falls, known to Gorky in the area of Sherman and Kent Falls, Connecticut. In Housatonic, vaguely biomorphic and spindly shapes are cast amid the broad details of nature – the sense of sunshine, shade, blue water and green foliage.

In the Virginia countryside during the summer of 1943, Gorky began to use crayons in a totally new fashion that would translate into a more vibrant use of color in his oil paintings. First, he outlined his forms with pen and ink or pencil, and then used crayons or pastel to highlight and animate them, in and out of synch with the black outlines, strategically leaving areas of the background bare in parallel to recent innovations in his paintings. He varied the application of crayon for texture and grain, achieving an array of moods related to light and dark, heavy and fine, evidenced by the jewel-like tones and velvety blacks of Housatonic. Gorky's compositions grouped his new biomorphic and Surrealist forms as if on a stage, with highly differentiated massed figures moving rhythmically across the picture plane, echoing the work of Old Masters, such as Pieter Brueghel. Yet the open areas of light color or white paper afford a fresh and airy quality that enhances the true beauty of Housatonic.

On his return to New York from his 1943 summer sojourn in Virginia, Gorky approached close friends such as Dorothy Miller, for their opinion on his new drawings, and was assured that they were a breakthrough in his oeuvre. Miller, the far-sighted curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, remembered. "[Gorky] came back with this huge portfolio full of those wonderful pencil drawings – crayons with pencil in them. I was crazy about them.'' (Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: a Life of Arshile Gorky, London, 1998, p. 351). Inspired by this support, Gorky experienced a burst of creative activity that would include Housatonic, leading toward the paintings that are at the pinnacle of his fame and influence such as One Year the Milkweed (1944, Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.) and How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life (1944, Seattle Art Museum).