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dated by the memory of the owner (to whom it was given freshly painted) to the very late 1930s. 16 Crooked Run Farm, within its stylistic boundaries, is most successful in conveying the heightened creative state in which Gorky worked on the form. To my knowledge, no other work of the farm of this descriptive style exists. 17 All other works done there have much more problematic relationships to the natural scene.
We turn now to the fields and hills of the farm, its broader landscape aspects. The Crooked Run Farm house is atop a hill facing south. In front of the house, beyond a fence, is a large pasture. Gorky's family has preserved a photo of Gorky seated drawing in this field, facing west. 18 The view toward Crooked Run, looking west, is the scene which Gorky faced on this occasion. We look down the hill, past a fencerow at the bottom of the pasture slope, through a hundred yards of lower pasture to the dense band of woods along the Crooked Run. Beyond, a curved hill capped again by a line of trees forms a high horizon. The view of an eastern field was taken uphill behind where Gorky sat. The other landscape photos are all from near the banks of the Crooked Run, in the valley.
A most interesting story is reported about the very beautiful untitled 1944 Gorky called here Landscape Drawing. The owner of the drawing, a good friend of the Gorkys and a Virginia neighbor at the time, was given the work by Gorky. Gorky explained to her, when she did not immediately understand the drawing, the visual sources for the images. Pointing to a specific landscape view on Crooked Run Farm, he indicated in his drawing the converging lines of receding harvest and fencerows. At the left middle-distance of landscape and drawing he pointed to a hayrick, and he indicated that there were trees to the far left and right in both scenes, specifically a fruit tree in the upper right. The triangular funnel or cornucopia form at the center foreground in the drawing Gorky called a pool of water, acknowledging in a bemused way that it was not from the observed landscape, but was an imaginative addition. The friend (from whom I have the story directly) felt that the correspondences Gorky pointed out were quite close, and that the key he provided was true in an observable topographical, as well as poetic sense. 19 The drawing is a bit more naturalistic than most other Gorky drawings of 1943-44, yet it falls so clearly within the artist's mainstream style that inferences may be made from this special case to the other works as well.
The view of an eastern field and the northern view are, I suggest, photos of comparable scenes on the farm. The eastern field is probably the nearest to the scene Gorky's friend remembers, which was near the front of the house. We observe first that a typical lay of the land is recorded in both photos: ascending, shallow hill undulations culminate in a high horizon at a moderate distance. The gentle curves of the hills are mapped by precise fencerows, where a line of brush is allowed to grow, and by the sharp demarcation of forest from field. Hardwood trees such as those to left and right in the photos provided Gorky with frames for the scene. Their limbs, thick with leaves, are silhouetted against the distant land and sky, providing myriad abstract biomorphic shapes from which the artist could choose. There is a suggestion in the large size and compact form of Gorky's fruit tree limb that it derived from something seen at very close range. This spatial confusion of the near and the far, which results from a formal equating of enlarged details with generalized distant forms, occurs frequently in such drawings.
Yet certainly not all of the forms in Landscape Drawing can be explained this way. Most notably, there is a curious symmetrical form, like an arrowhead, stylized fir tree, or spade, decorated with filaments and a pencil halo which hovers just on or above the horizon. Such horizon incidents occur in many of these drawings. This one, like many others, is reminiscent of Miró's style of detail; but its landscape placement is most closely related to the distant "troikas" and riders in Kandinsky's 1910-13 abstract works. The actual horizons of the farm are at times punctuated by distant buildings, and the "arrowhead" may be a substitute, evocative, art-derived symbol put into the spatial place of a banal barn or gate. Certainly the form is an effective compositional focus; and presenting its graphic, abstract emphasis at the farthest point of deep space, it serves to flatten the drawing. The eye or breast-like form of the fruit tree, the soft hayrick, and many forms to the left and right suggest anthropomorphic details. These are, however, the other half of Gorky's drawing. equation: having drawn abstract forms from nature-banked them as it were- he revivifies them with new and various associations.
I know of no other specific explanation of imagery such as that which Gorky gave for Landscape Drawing. With other works we have to guess, guided by the outlines of the previous case. The spectacular 1943 drawing Virginia Landscape can be compared to the view of lowland vegetation. The photo was taken from below the sunken bank of the Crooked Run with an eye level close to the ground of the pasture. The purpose was to test literally the idea recorded by Sweeney that Gorky "looked into the grass." From a matted layer of thick stemmed grasses rises at the right a tall milkweed (about a yard high, to establish scale), and farther to the right is visible another of a large variety of rag-weed type plants. Others mingled with small climbing vines appear in the left foreground. Beginning in the middle distance trees step back in perspective toward, after a couple of fencerows, an elevated horizon with a farm building. The photo was contrived to not only record the infinity of vegetable shapes which confronts the near viewer, but to study the space and scale effects between a low close vantage point and the view beyond.
In Virginia Landscape one has a similar juxtaposition of detail, conceived as near, with more

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