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generalized forms. For example, on the left in the drawing, a flowering form, not unlike a bursting milkweed pod, is placed next to large forms from upper left which could be milkweed leaves or distant tree limbs. Next to the right, both horizontally and vertically, single lines mark off compositional phrases analogous to the larger contours of the landscape. Flower, plant, even insect or bird-related details alternate, in an almost regular checkerboard rhythm across the drawing. On the right, analogous to the photograph's milkweed, a large frond leaps up in the Gorky, colored with a blazing plume of crayon. On the right border, more general middle and deep space motifs carry the drawing back from the foreground so richly established by the lower-right color patch - more a color location than a shape. The eye moves ceaselessly back and forth in space in and out. In a reversal of the natural sequence, and for the purpose of controlling the depth of space, Gorky consistently makes his foreground forms most general and vague. His close-view details of leaves and grass are displaced to positions in middle and deep space.

The space in the photo view down a western slope may help to clarify the spatial configuration in many other 1943-44 Gorky drawings. Here it is compared to the magnificent Anatomical Blackboard of 1943. Gorky's major forms are at a middle-ground distance, stretching as a screen across the drawing, slightly curved back in the center. At two points in the drawing analogous to the photo view, the screen opens for a view of a distant hill horizon. The diminutive horizon incident to the left of center in the drawing offers the same riddle as in previous drawings. Here some active form such as a distant animal or farm machine is suggested as the prototype.

Anatomical Blackboard is one of the most highly developed drawings of its type. The more prominent lines are deeply inscribed into the paper and reinforced in places with black crayon. The most generalized forms lie in the foreground. The most specific-appearing parts are along the center left, extending above the horizon, and off the paper at center top. We have again the near-far paradox, the scale confusion. The details at the top of the tree masses are exceedingly hard and specific. They were heavily worked by Gorky, much erased, scraped, and redrawn. They appear as plant and animal: cross-sections of seed pods and flowers, hybridized sexual and visceral shapes. Whatever their referents, they are displaced from near to far.

While the style of detail in Gorky's 1943-44 drawings can be seen to relate to some sources in other artists' work, yet it is a new creation and wholly Gorky's own. With brilliant variations, it supplies the aspect of detail to most of the great works of the rest of his career. The spiky cornucopia of Landscape Drawing, the butterflies and rosettes of Virginia Landscape, and the flowers and viscera of Anatomical Blackboard show a debt to Miró. Particularly Miróesque are the petal or tongue-like forms which often radiate from a floral wheel: such flaming circles are the eyes in Miró's Self-Portrait I (1937-38). The parallel striations of small tubular and liver-shaped forms, particularly in Anatomical Blackboard, may owe a debt to some late 1930s Picasso works. Beyond this, we have seen the suggestions of the Virginia landscape. Gorky reacted to the compact shapes of the hardwood trees, the curved limbs with their scimitar leaves, the burr of the chestnut, and the striated stems and pods of the lowland undergrowth. All these sources are thoroughly mingled and digested over 1943 and the amalgam was something new. 

Gorky gained in confidence as he perfected this new language of detail. The ink and crayon Composition I and Housatonic of 1943, as Schwabacher first implied, [[superscript]]20[[/superscript]] must have been done several months before the highly developed Anatomical Blackboard, as their earlier detailing is tentative and generalized. While the 1944 drawings are not necessarily more abstract than those of 1943, witness Landscape Drawing, their detail tends to be more firm, practiced, and stylized. Yet it is unusually difficult to tell Gorky's 1943 drawings from those of 1944 even on the basis of detail.

There is a clear relationship between Gorky's pictorial space and the Virginia landscape. Gorky places his major forms in a horizontal row beyond a flat shelf-like foreground, and before a high hill horizon. To take the name from one of Gorky's 1945 paintings, this constitutes a "landscape table." While this configuration most likely had its ultimate source in Gorky's study of the table space of Cubism, yet it is very different from what Cubism had become for him in the late 1930s. Following Picasso of a few years prior, Khorkom and Enigmatic Combat present a turgid version of late Synthetic Cubism, overcharged to the bursting point with its expressionistic content. As Rubin and others have pointed out, the Sochi paintings, Mojave, and the famous Waterfall, all of around 1940 to 1943, show variously how Gorky began to open his space through the influence of Miró and Kandinsky.[[superscript]]21[[/superscript]] We have observed that in the 1943 drawings Gorky was free from the heavy, dogmatic Cubist matrix. He did not, however, intend to give up his modern flattening of form and relation to the surface for an old-fashioned deep space. By switches of distance and scale in the near-far device, Gorky brought his depth