Untitled

Thin black graphite lines wander and weave across Arshile Gorky’s exceptional Untitled, ebulliently merging and mingling to produce suggestively biomorphic and naturalistic shapes and forms interspersed with flashes of primary color. Executed in 1946 at Crooked Run Farm in rural Virginia, Untitled emerges from a pivotal period in Gorky’s life, reflecting his mature style which would prove enduringly influential to later generations of artists. Gorky had first developed his naturalistic landscape drawings in 1943, and his explorations on paper produced a novel synthesis of Surrealist automatism and Analytical Cubism amalgamated with Gorky’s characteristic visual vernacular. Displaying Gorky’s deep knowledge of and commitment to his artistic forebearers, including the Old Masters Paolo Uccello and Peter Brueghel the Elder, and the modern European artists Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled revels in the great American artist’s considered draftsmanship and compositional brilliance, balancing imagery taken from nature with imagined abstractions to create one of the first leaps into Abstract Expressionism. The radical genius of Gorky’s drawings led André Breton, the principle theorist and leader of the Surrealist movement, to extol the artist’s “grace of emotion,” stating: “The eye-spring… Arshile Gorky—for me the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed!” (A. Breton, "The Eye-Spring—Arshile Gorky," in Arshile Gorky, exh. cat., Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1945, n.p.).

Gorky and his family arrived at Crooked Run in the summer of 1946 for his third and final summer there, embracing the tranquil environment of the arcadian escape. Gorky suffered dual setbacks earlier in the year—his studio burned down along with many of his artworks, and he was recovering from intensive surgery following a cancer diagnosis. Unable to paint, he retreated into nature once again, finding physical and spiritual renewal and a newfound prolificity. His wife Agnes, in a letter to the artist Jeanne Reynal at the end of their summer stay, writes how “Gorky is really feeling happier in his work than ever before… Gorky [is] so on fire with his drawing he cant [sic] lie in bed at night.” (A. Gorky, “Letter to Jeanne Reynal,” in Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song, A Life in Letters and Documents, ed. Matthew Spender, Zurich, 2018, p. 405). Writing a month later, Agnes Gorky describes how Gorky “has drawn & drawn. That’s what he wanted to do like drinking at a spring” (ibid., p. 405).

Gorky arranges his densely drawn swelling and collapsing forms in a traditional compositional manner, the work flowing rightward across the paper and receding slightly into deeper space as his flowing lines progress to the left edge. Gorky invented his forms through a dual process, first interrogating the nature around him at Crooked Farm by physically and psychologically engaging in the natural world, his keen eye carefully dissecting and absorbing its complicated beauty. The artist then transformed the shapes and forms gleaned from his naturalistic investigation, synthesizing them within his idiosyncratic vernacular, abstracting and isolating form from its original context into what André Breton described as a hybrid fusing vision, fantasy, and improvisation. Gorky’s close involvement with his subject is revealed in several passages of Untitled, where he works graphite with his bare fingers to produce soft gray circles which surround certain of his forms. With these gestural strokes, Gorky gets as close to his medium as he was with the nature. Discussing his landscape drawings with his friend Robert Jonas, Gorky wrote, “you see, these are the leaves, this is the grass. I got down close to see it. I got them from getting down close to earth. I could hear it and smell it. Like a little world down there” (A. Gorky, quoted in K. Mooradian, The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky, Chicago, 1980, p. 152).

Gorky incises brilliant passages of color economically throughout Untitled, leaving the work primarily black-and-white with shaded and cross-hatched graphite lines providing tonal contrast. These subtle interjections of red and yellow are deeply affective, emphasizing his skill as a master draftsman while accentuating the abstract nature of his composition. Some scholars interpret his late drawings as recalling "genitals or viscera and must have welled up from Gorky’s subconscious fantasies” (J. C. Lee, “Arshile Gorky: The Power of Drawing,” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003, p. 63). Gorky here follows the influence of Raphael, whom he carefully studied. The Renaissance master was famed for the subtle eroticism of his naturalistic fresco motifs, particularly in the frescoed festoons of the Villa Farnesina in Rome. While attending as always to the art historical tradition from which Gorky developed his hugely influential style, in the present work Gorky simultaneously looks forward, anticipating future developments in Abstract Expressionism. His syncretic integration of Surrealism and Cubism into the historical procession of artistic styles provided a formative lesson for the Abstract Expressionists, while his black-and-white explorations from 1946, including the present work, influenced Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell’s explorations with a restricted color palette. Meanwhile, Gorky’s liberal use of graphite and floating patches of color in Untitled would reemerge with Cy Twombly, who acknowledged his debt to the artist with his Untitled (Stones Are Our Food to Gorky) now in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The present work played a significant role in consolidating Gorky’s status, having been exhibited in several of the artist’s most important museum retrospectives, including the 1951 traveling Arshile Gorky Memorial Exhibition originating at the Whitney and the 1962 retrospective originating at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Summarizing on Gorky’s profound legacy, de Kooning proclaimed that “it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence,” the artist’s oeuvre providing an endowment which to this day continues to benefit artists (W. de Kooning, quoted in op. cit., p. 65).