This untitled drawing by Arshile Gorky relates to a series of work he made at Crooked Run Farm in Lincoln, Virginia, during the summer of 1946. The farm belonged to his parents-in-law, the Magruders, and he went with his family to stay for several months. During that time he made many drawings that register the fireplace in the living room. A comparison with closely related works shows that the forms on the left in this drawing depict an elongated figure, a blazing hearth at the centre, and on the right a chair, lamp and side table. The series, known as ‘Fireplace in Virginia’, was described by Ethel Schwabacher in 1957:

"In the firelit Magruder living room, the summer of 1946, he did a series of small drawings depicting interiors. Looked at casually they did not seem to deal directly with his major themes but they were, in fact, used as a base for some of his most important late paintings. He here introduced his major image—the human figure—and supplementary images of fire, receptacle and flight, developing them in varying combinations throughout the series."

An Armenian-born immigrant to the United States, Gorky was an important catalyst in the development of an original modernist movement around New York in the forties. In drawings such as this, he created an imaginative, liminal world that exists somewhere between ‘pure’ abstraction and the world of visible reality. The looping pencil marks outline attenuated, elongated bodies; casually scribbled areas of shading create softly accented silhouettes; the forms flow freely into each other, and despite their slender, spindly volumes, they are enmeshed in the flat, diagrammatic surface of the drawing. The idiom is highly specific to Gorky, yet the imagery is saturated with several remarkably compressed allusions to the work of canonical modern artists: the steeply pitched, thinly stained landscapes of Paul Cezanne; the lyrical abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky; the surrealist stick figures of Joan Míro; the wiry mobiles of Alexander Calder. The simultaneous compression of such eclectic material into a single image is a definitive aspect of Gorky’s personally distinctive mature work.

The only areas of colour in this work are small, linear applications of yellow crayon in the upper right-hand region, which act as highlights of a kind. They may suggest the glow of an electric lamp. The upper left- and right-hand corners of the sheet are punctured by two pin holes, which suggest that Gorky worked on the drawing over more than one session. Although the sheet is lightly covered and the forms are afforded their own space, the composition encompasses the entirety of the support and is fully worked through. The improvised appearance of Gorky’s work suggests it was invented in a single spurt of activity. This quality later formed the basis of Action Painting as the critic Harold Rosenberg defined it in the fifties. Yet such appearances are calculated to mislead the viewer. A sophisticated and sustained process was involved in the making of such drawings, and the fresh immediacy of Gorky’s work rests on an impressive conceit that directly inspired a younger generation of American artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly.

This drawing was first owned by the art dealer Julien Levy whose important monograph about the artist was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1966. He was a personal friend of Gorky’s and was likely the last person who spoke to him, by telephone, on the day of Gorky’s suicide in 1948. Levy was an important patron of surrealist art in New York who helped to promote and popularise Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí among many others, and it was partly his involvement that helped to establish New York as the successor to Paris as the centre of the art world. In the words of art historian Martica Sawin, Levy made his gallery into ‘a veritable beachhead of Surrealism in the United States’. He held solo exhibitions of Gorky’s work at his New York gallery in 1945, 1946, 1947 and 1948.

Owing to the paucity of reproductions from these early exhibitions, and Gorky’s habit of leaving his drawings untitled, it is difficult to establish the early exhibition history of this work. It was recorded in Julien Levy Gallery’s inventory and was perhaps shown there with other ‘coloured drawings’ in 1947. It subsequently entered Levy’s private collection, and his collection of Gorky’s work was shown on two occasions: first at Yale University Art Gallery in 1964, then at Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago, in 1969. It was bought from Feigen by the Danish curator Steingrim Laursen (1931–2007), who became director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, and a member of the international council of MOMA, New York, in 1972. Laursen and his partner Jan Groth (1938–2022), a Norwegian artist, acquired a significant collection of modern art including one other drawing by Gorky and work by Edvard Munch, Asger Jorn and Robert Rauschenberg among others. This work was bought privately from Groth by a personal friend in 2019.

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Unusually among the celebrated artists who worked in America during and after the Second World War, Arshile Gorky was more proficient and prolific with pencil and paper than with oil paint and canvas. He was impoverished when he emigrated from his native Armenia to the United States in 1920, and economic conditions were such that ‘the plentiful possession of paints and canvas’ were ‘an almost unattainable dream of luxury’. These material restrictions helped to foster his talents as a draughtsman, as they ‘forced him to confine his unrelenting creative energies almost exclusively to pencil and paper’, as his friend and dealer Julien Levy suggested in 1966. In drawings made after 1943 or so, Gorky achieved a personal style that the critic Clement Greenberg described with approval in his important article, ‘ “American-Type” Painting’, published by Partisan Review in 1955: ‘Gorky found his own way to ease the pressure of Picassoid space, and learned to float shapes on a melting, indeterminate ground with a difficult stability quite unlike anything in Miró’.

To the critic Harold Rosenberg, Gorky’s work was ‘almost a visual metaphor of the digestion of European painting on this side of the Atlantic and its conversion into a new substance.’ In short, ‘by whatever measure one ranks the founders of contemporary American abstract art, Arshile Gorky has a place on the top row.’ This sentiment was echoed by the art critic Robert Hughes in his popular history of Modernism, The Shock of the New, where he described how Gorky’s ‘life as a mature artist formed a Bridge of Sighs between Surrealism and America’. To substantiate this statement, Hughes wrote of Gorky’s mature work:

"The spidery fluent line, drawn with pencil or thin flitch, that he had derived from Miró now began to describe a wholly original landscape of organic form, suffused with the intense yet cotton-edged and indeterminate patches of colour he had acquired from pre-1914 Kandinsky."

Hughes further described the forms that populate Gorky’s unreal landscape: ‘a compost of allusion to flower stems, tendons, human sexual organs, claws, stamens, guts, and feathers, pulsating with a glandular preconscious glow. […] It looks into the body, not out from it.’