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published for a Gorky show at Julien Levy's gallery that Gorky was, "of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature-sits down to paint before her." But Breton's central concern was not with Gorky's sources in nature, but with what Gorky made of them: "rightly he demands of her (nature) that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind... nature is treated as a cryptogram."^6

Subsequent writes have rightly emphasized the crucial role Gorky's Crooked RUn landscapes played for the rest of his art.^7 Schwabacher, in her full-scale study of Gorky, describes the artist "sitting before nature," where "Gorky dissected root, stem, insect, leaf and flower, studying genesis and process; out of these studies he created an alphabet of forms."^8 It has been implied in several studies that in these drawings too there first appears Gorky's mature model of pictorial space.^9 This, three large issues can be seen as having nexus in Gorky's Virginia drawings, particularly those of the early summers 1943 and 1944. First, Gorky created in them "an alphabet of form," a personal style of detail derived at least partially from the landscape and compared to his 1930s work, comparatively free from the influence of others' art. Second, the drawings of 1943-44 first emboy Gorky's post-Picasso pictorial space, the "landscape table" organization that structures all the work of GOrky's 1943-48 classic period. Third, the Virginia landscape experience occasioned the coming together of a number of disparate threads, personal and artistic, out of Gorky's pastl an amalgamation through which, to use Rosenberg's and Levy's formulations, Gorky "became himself." 

In the summer of 1974, I visited Crooked Run Farm to study and photograph the scenes of Gorky's drawings and, if possible, to examine first hand the relationship between Gorky's art and the landscape.^10 The present owners of the farm, Admiral and Mrs. William Small, were most gracious in allowing me to wander through and photograph the landscape. The models for this kind of study are well known. Study use has been made of Kahnweiler's photograph of the motif of Braque's Houses at L'Estaque, and of Picasso's snapshot of is own motif at Horta de San Juan^11 It was my initial hope that some of Gorky's drawing motifs could be located on Crooked Run Farm, and that some precise observations could be made about the nature quotient in his art. 

My hope for precision was, however, frustrated. With the exception of the farm house scene, no exact motifs were located. All evidence indicates that the basic landscape plan of fields, trees, and fencerows has remained the same from the time Gorky drew them to the present day. Yet most of the specific aspects of the landscape upon which Gorky fixed have surely disappeared. Gorky fixed have surely disappeared. Gorky concentrated on the software of the landscape: read clumps and casually presented contours of foliage. Sich ephemera as seed pods, twists of weed fronds, succulent grasses and vines scarcely service a few days in the wildly growing Virginia climate-much less a whole season. After thirty years only the most general lines can be left. Cezanne and Braque fixed on rocks, hills, houses, and large trees. It was the perishable flesh of the landscape, not its bones, which interested Gorky. 

Yet, within the lay of the land which is unchanged, the same kinds of foliage sprout forth each year, and typical local shapes can be discerned. The feel of the heat, the dampness, the sounds, sights, and smells of Henry Adams' "profligate vegetation" still engulf the visitor. The landscape has a powerful, even possible threatening presence in its fecund mood. And the near-hallucinatory feelings of Gorky, drawing under the blistering sun, are never distant in this place. 

With a series of photographs of the farm and selection of works which I feel are related, I proposed to examine the three critical themes named above, from a new point of view. 

Certainly the small forms at the top of Anatomical Blackboard resemble sexual shapes and viscera the same extent, or for some to a greater extent, than they do details of flora. And Gorky himself indicated more problematic anthropomorphic and psychological associations for his art by such titles as Anatomical Blackboard, The Liver is the Cock's Comb, and They Will Take My Island. Yet such equally poetic and evocative titles as Cornfield of Health, One Year the Milkweed, and The Plow and the Song point to personal reactions to the landscape, on a deep level, and we will follow this direction here.^12 Finally, the present study confirms my belief that there is no single simple key to Gorky's imagery or iconography. Gorky saw everything and form as a hybrid. No matter how carefully one tries to isolate any one aspect of Gorky's work, when it is placed again in the context of the whole, all precision flees in (Breton's phrase) "the free, unlimited play of analogies."^13

The Magruder family has preserved a photo of the large old barn in the loft of which, in the early summers, Gorky had his studio. In the same view, the small white building across the access road is a milkhouse. Crooked Run Farm is a painting by Gorky done in 1943 or 1944 from the barn, over the milkhouse, of the main house. The milkhouse as it is seen from the road today, is virtually unchanged except for the growth of the trees on either side.^14 The low easten wing of the house, visible in the painting and in the more frontal snapshot of the house-taken by the Margruders in the early 1940s- has been replaced by newer additions, changing the aspect over the milkhosue in my photo. 

The Crooked Run Farm painting is a unique document of Gorky's stay on the farm. It was painted in oil on a wood panel, and was probably intended as a loving record of the hospitable farmhouse, and perhaps meant as a kind of gift to Gorky's in-laws. It is in a descriptive style which was rare for Gorky bu this date, and which recalls the Cezannesque works of c. 1926-28, although the brushwork is more like Van Gogh than Cezanne. The rhythmic patterning and phrasing of the scene gave Gorky latitude for both nature and style; the house and buildings are accurately portrayed, but the earth, trees, and sky are expressively animated, giving vehemence and emotional electricity to the scene. It now appears that this post-Impressionist manner, begun in the 1920s, was held in reserve by Gorky and called into service on a few occasions when a non-Cubist, non-abstract landscape style was desired.^15 The Metropolitan Museum has a small landscape of this style; and another done in Central Park in the same manner is securely