On a background of thick and opaque colour, created, as was customary of Gorky, by superimposing various layers of paint, which in this painting succeed in evoking a translucent and primordial atmosphere, Gorky draws the contours of various forms. The black, thin, quick, irregular line is very characteristic of his drawings from this period, revealing how Gorky learned to free his hand with the surrealist practice of automatic drawing. In this painting the forms evoke, in a particularly explicit and unique manner in his work from the final period, some models of Armenian ploughs, which are as if suspended in the composition, arranged along its horizontal axis. Although the planes of drawing and painting appear to be quite distinct here, creating greater distance than in his other compositions, Gorky succeeds in uniting them. To achieve this he uses his unique technique of preparing the canvas surface, creating a thick background of uneven, textured colour, which surrounds the forms. These forms are drawn in dynamic equilibrium, enhanced by the use of patches of colour – black, red and yellow –, which refrain from completely filling the forms and interact with each other.

 

Researchers on Gorky’s work coincide in reference to the beginning of the 1940s as a fundamental period of change in his creative process. Louis Finkelstein points to the union of surrealist automatism with the direct sensory experience of nature as the main reason for this creative metamorphosis. For Finkelstein, this process of abstraction is identical to that of the 1930s, which was however used in the formal stylistic context of cubism.* Prolonged contact with the countryside, from 1942 onwards, and the «revelation of the secret of surrealism»,** take him to new levels of abstraction, to the creation of «hybrid» images, as André Breton famously called them, born from the union of vision with fantasy and improvisation. Another simultaneous phenomenon, and one that was probably related to this one, occurs. By freeing his hand, and letting flow this unexpected iconography which was revealed to him through the almost microscopic observation of nature, his head immersed in the grass, the senses awakened by the incessant activity of the myriad of living organisms, Gorky liberates the pictorial evocation of his memories of Armenia and the painful experience of loss and separation which he had lived as a young boy. In this painting, which seems to be intended for his youngest and closest sister, Vartoosh Mooradian, this memory is as if sublimated and simplified. The forms are recognisable, in an atmosphere which is sweetly evocative of a shared past.

 

 

Ana Vasconcelos

May 2010

 

 

* Finkelstein cited by Melvin P. Lader, «What the drawings reveal. Some Observation on Arshile Gorky’s Working Method», in Arshile Gorky. A Retrospective of Drawings, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2003, p. 42.

** «Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret (of Surrealism) has been completely revealed!», Breton cited by Janie C. Lee, «Arshile Gorky. The Power of Drawing», in idem, p. 63.