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ARTS MAGAZINE, V. 50, N. 7 (March 1976).

ARSHILE GORKY AT CROOKED RUN FARM

JIM M. JORDAN

The land was fertile--between 1943 and 1946 Gorky drew from the Virginia landscape--not for direct observation, but as the catalyst for Gorky's mature style.

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View toward Crooked Run, looking west, 1974.[[/right]]

"The Potomac and its tributaries squandered beauty . . . The tulip and the chestnut gave no sense of struggle against a stingy nature. The soft, full outlines of the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could mot leave it, but loitered on into July, falling into the Southern ways of the summer village."
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1918


The summer landscape of northern Virginia is incredibly rich. One sees rolling hills covered with alternate expanses of grazing lands and dense thick-set woods. The woods seen from a distance have a curiously even height, which, beside the close cropped pastures, gives the land a textured effect, like a giant rug. Up close, the forests are densely tangled, a temperate zone jungle where light and shadow run in intricate patterns through the near-monochrome dark green of the lush undergrowth. Creeks and small "runs" fill the bottom seams of the valleys, lying nearly still in the hot days of August; their banks are thick with an overgrown tangle of weeds and roots. In a still hour one hears the tick of insect life, the rustle of small animals and reptiles under the weed mat. The pastures, high or low, are open and sunny with, at midday, the mirage shimmer of hot rising air. On these hovering clouds of heat, and on the occasional horizontal breezes, are borne not only the landscape sounds but the rich odors as well: the steam from the dark earth, the smell of sweet grasses cooked by the sun, the waft of decay from a bottomland or cut-over pile of brush. Cattle and, frequently, riding horses move across the pastures in the cooler hours, and the occasional sound of farm machinery is a counterpoint to the punctuation of the landscape by fences and hedgerows, and at less frequent intervals, houses and barns. It is a land of fox hunts and gentleman farmers in its livelier months. But in the dead of summer one feels the landscape to be much more powerful than man-a scene of rampant growth, fertility, where the rich processes of life have their primordial way, and an observant man can be led by the landscape to rich and extravagant dreams.

It was to this region that Arshile Gorky came first in the summer of 1943. Crooked Run Farm, in Loudoun County, Virginia, had been recently acquired by Gorky's in-laws, Admiral and Mrs. John H. Magruder II; and Gorky, his wife Agnes, and their young daughter Maro came to stay there as a summer's respite from New York City.1 From time to time in earlier years Gorky had visited friends out in the city, and the couple had spent a few weeks in rural Connecticut with Saul Schary the previous summer. The large Virginia farm with its two-story 19th-century farm house, and its variety of open fields, dense woods, and shady creek banks along the Crooked Run was a refreshing, relaxing place to be. The Gorkys came back to Crooked Run Farm for a nine-months stay in 1944, and again spent a long summer there in 1946 following Gorky's operation for cancer. These stays were for Gorky working vacations, and during the first two summers he set up his studio base in the large old barn. Gorky's chief activity during these summers was drawing before the landscape. 
Gorky's production of these summers was prodigious as his art took wing and he cast aside the hesitancies of his many years of apprenticeship. The summer of 1946 at Crooked Run Farm produced almost three hundred drawings,2 and similar numbers must date to the 1943 and 1944 stays there. Artistically, Gorky realized himself in the Crooked Run drawings of early summers. The hot sun of Virginia ignited in him the incandescent creative blaze of his final years. Ethel Schwabacher has noted that "Gorky had always felt a cold sense of isolation in the city." She quotes Agnes Gorky's observations of Gorky, in letters from 1945 and 1946, that "It takes him a long time as a rule to feel at home--Virginia is one exception--it just touches something in him immediately." Agnes wrote that Gorky was "fearfully linked with the sun," and that he always worked best in summer. This may indeed reflect, as she suggested, a linking up with his personal Near-Eastern heritage.3
Recently published letters, written by Gorky in Armenian to his sister Vartoosh, vividly confirm this.4 In a letter from Crooked Run Farm of July 1943, Gorky wrote, "The state of Virginia reminds one of Armenia's lowlands... although it is less magestic." In April 1944, probably just before the annual move to the farm, Gorky mused, "it is as if some ancient Armenian spirit within me moves my hand to create so far from our homeland the shapes of nature we loved in the gardens, wheatfields, and orchards of our Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we lost and which I will repossess in my art." And after that summer, in December: "You cannot imagine the fertility of forms that leap from our Armenian plows... I smell the apricots hot on orchard trees and they move for me in dances of old." These words, so close in spirit to those few wondering lines of Henry Adams, record an emotional and spiritual homecoming for Gorky. 
Those who followed Arshile Gorky's work were quick to recognize the manifold of significance of the drawings done at Crooked Run Farm. In 1944, James Johnson Sweeney observed that Gorky's drawings of the previous summer embodied a revitalization of his art, signaled a return to nature for inspiration. With what skill strikes me as fine accuracy, Sweeney wrote, "Last summer Gorky decided to put out of his mind the galleries of Fifty-seventh Street and the reproductions of Picasso, Léger and Miró, and 'look into the grass' as he put it. The product was a series of monumentally drawn details of what one might see in the heavy August grass, rendered without a thought of his fellow-artists' ambitions or theories of what a picture should be."5 In 1945 André Breton, new friend and champion of Gorky's art, wrote in the preface