Viewing page 40 of 58

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

(image)
At left:
Arshile Gorky, Anatomical Blackboard, 1943. Pencil and crayon on paper, 201/4 x 27 3/8". Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss.
Opposite page; above left:
View of an easter field, 1974.
Opposite page; above right:
Northern view, 1974
Opposite page; below right:
View of milkhouse and house, 1974

to the surface and flattened the protrusion of the foreground. With such controls he could respond to distant horizons and yet sacrifice none of his flat graphic effect.
Up to this point I have not discussed the incredibly rich color in these drawings, for I do not think it relates to the visible landscape per se. Aspects of color and technique are, however, important signs of Gorky's personal and artistic synthesis, his final coming together in these drawings. The summer Virginia landscape is in actual color, despite its other kinds of variety, a most monotonous green. Yet in the drawings of the period green is merely one equivalent color among many. Gorky's colors have origins and purposes other than description. Free-formed streamers and discs of color, often purple, orange, and blue-green, float translucently within the drawings, leading the eye in large compositional movements. We may consider them emotional punctuation marks, the most expressionist aspect of the works. For Gorky, much more than Henry Adams, this landscape was alive with almost overwhelming emotions; and the color plumes and patches record these intangible feelings. They may depict responses to sounds and odors, to the blinding sun, to the shimmer of heat rising from the ground. Color embodies an emotional power Gorky had never before harnessed for his art. (22)
Color plays a role too in bringing together the isolated structural and lyrical strains out of Gorky's past. The early 1943 Housatonic drawing offers a clue. In this ink and crayon work, Gorky experiments with substituting color for his early 1930s type of heavy crosshatching. In the advanced 1943 style, color bears a large share of the structure as it spatially inflects the major planes. Gorky's elegant line finds a new freedom in this context. Throughout the mid and late 1930s, Gorky's celebrated Ingresque line had been used to its best advantage in drawings of friends, in the intense self-portraits, and in the drawings of his mother's face-all personal, emotional subject matter.      In the 1943-44 drawings, Gorky finds this same lyric, emotional charge in the landscape, and his line was liberated to endless inventiveness. 23 From 1944 on, these successes in drawing engender the classic paintings.
In the work at Crooked Run Farm, Gorky found the language of detail, the organization of space, and the coloristic power of his triumphant mature style. Our visit to the farm, to the catalytic landscape, has afforded some insights into how these things took place. Gorky found himself beyond New York, far from his art books and reproductions from Paris. In the southern sun he became again the country man, the farm boy of his youth, singing the strange and tender songs of his origins before a living landscape.
(footnotes)
1. The basic information on Gorky's visits to Crooked Run Farm is from Ethel Schwabacher's study and b biography (italics0 Arshile Gorky (New York, 1957). These facts have been reconfirmed to me in conversations with Gorky's wife's mother, Mrs. John H. Magruder, II, and others of the family.
2. Schwabacher, p. 114.
3. Ibid., pp. 93, 96.
4. Karlen Mooradian, Ararat: a Special Issue on Arshile Gorky, XII, 4 (Fall 1971). The letters here quoted are from p. 29-30, and 32-33. 
5. Quoted in Schwabacher, P.  96.
6. Quoted in Dorothy Miller, ed., Fourteen Americans (The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), p. 22.
7 Elaine de Kooning, Seitz, Rosenberg, Reiff, Rand, and others have all discussed the Crooked Run drawings, in their articles and books, in the larger context of Gorky's imagery or iconography.
*. Schwabacher, p. 97.
9. As in Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky (New Your, 1962); and in William Rubin, "Arshile Gorky, Surrealism, and the New American  Painting," Art International, VII, 3 (Feb. 1963). For a specific analysis of the pictorial space in the :Pastoral" series of 1946-47, see my Gorky: Drawings  (New York, 1969).
10. I owe to Rachel Jordan the original idea for this study. Her observations and intuitions about Gorky and the Virginia landscape have been an important source for me.
11. Reproduced in Edward Fry, Cubism  (New Your, 1966), plates 10 and 14.
12 The fact that Andre Breton helped Gorky formulate these poetic titles makes no difference here, as he collaborated on titles of both types.
13. In Gorky's work, visual associations spin off on all sides. There is scarcely a single small sketch dashed off in the 1920s and 1930s which doesn't have a  visual double-entendre. In Gorky: Drawings I detailed my observation that before a given motif, Gorky both abstracts (encodes) and reads-in (decodes) his images simultaneously. Such art cannot ultimately be unraveled in an iconological way. Any attempt, including my present one, to specify any one aspect of Gorky's imagery must be provisional.
14. The replacement in subsequent years of the barn (which burned down in 1945) with a tenant house prevented my exactly duplicating the view of the Crooked Run Farm paining, for permission to reproduce it here. 
15. Sketch in Central Park, c. 1939, was given by Gorky to its owners Professor and Mrs. Alexander Sandow. Saul Schary has a late 1930s Gorky of thjis style. It was Mr. Schary who, when describing Gorky working on this painting, characterized the post-Impressionist style as one Gorky brought out for special occasions. These details are drawn from The Paintings of Arshile Gorky: a Critical Catalogue, by the late Robert Goldwater and myself, soon to be published.
17. In the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, there is a wooden barn door decorated with an abstract bull's head painted by Gorky, the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Whitton, one of the later owners of Crooked Run Farm. The door actually belonged to a small shed which still stands  (though in a different location) behind the house. One summer, house painters working on the farm stored their materials in the shed. Gorky light-heartedly painted the very Mirbesque bull's head with a fe strokes of the house painters' brush and paint. Traces of the same paint are still to be seen on the door jambs of the shed, which is conceivably the one shown behing the house in the Crooked Run Farm paingint. Mrs. Magruder, Mr. Whitton, and the Smalls have clarified these details.
18. mrs. Magruder also provided the original photographs of the house and barn. All other photographs are by the author.
19. My sincere thanks go to the owner of this drawing for the story and the permission to reproduce the work. I am similarly indebted to the owner of Virginia Landscape and to Mr. Walter Bareiss, owner of Anatomical Blackboard, for permissions to illustrate their respective drawings.
20. Schwabacher, P. 96 and fig. 40, Housatonic.  Composition I appears in color in Levy, Pl. 111.
21. Rubin, op.cit., where the influence of Matta is also emphasized.
22. It is possible that these expressionist ovals and plumes owe a partial debt to similar color bursts in Picasso's Guernica-related drawings of  1937. In one of them a color smudge bursts like a sound from a screaming mouth.
23. Again, the most conservative side of Gorky from the 1930s supplied a technique to his most exploratory side in the 1940s drawings. The technique of washing, scraping, and erasing the surfaces of drawings had been used, through the mid-30s, to prematurely age the paper, "like the paper of an old-master drawing" (Schwabacher, p. 52). The same conservative purpose probably guided Gorky's smoothing of paint surfaces with a razor blade. The blade was dragged with pressure across the surface, removing a brushstrokes and sinking the color into a resemblance of Old-Master glaze painting. (The mother's face in The Artist and His Mother is lovingly burnished in this way. My thanks to Jacob Keinen for his detailed description of this Gorky technique.) This same technique made possible in 1943-44 Gorky's incredible mixing and blending in the awkward medium of wax crayon. Error and correction are transfigured in these drawings into an art of open exploration, where each erasure enriches and adds resonance to the surface. 
103