ARSHILE GORKY | YOUNG CHERRY TREES SECURED AGAINST HARES

Of the many abstract painters exhibited and collected by Allan Stone, few are more closely associated with his program and expertise than Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky. Allan Stone mounted numerous comprehensive exhibitions of Gorky's work, and many of the most revered Gorky paintings and works on paper in prestigious collections today passed through Allan Stone's hands.

The present lot is a book of poems by André Breton for which he asked Gorky to produce unique drawings in 1945. Marcel Duchamp contributed the cover design and the title was a chance find in a horticulture magazine that also contains a pun on Breton's private life, whose wife had recently left him for artist David Hare. The imagery in the over 40 unique drawings that Gorky produced to accompany Breton's poems did not so much illustrate the poems, as they applied free association mark making analogous with the poetry's evocation, similarly free from logic or narration. With their vertical format, out of norm from his typically landscape oriented compositions, these drawings formed the bases for a painting entitled Nude, 1946, and the highly important suite of paintings entitled Charred Beloved of the same year (Isabelle Dervaux, [Unpublished Manuscript], New York 2000).

Though his life was tragically short, Gorky is recognized as an essential bridge between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expression. Gorky is most-recognizable in mature works that employ the Surrealist technique of “automatic drawing,” where pen or pencil marks are made without preconception and the creations are interpreted as subconscious thought. His innovative style combined childhood memories—the gardens, orchards and wheat fields—with direct observations from his American life. The resultant works are both specific and allusive, generating symbols that are both stirring and relatable, but unable to be definitively identified. Many artists, particularly those of the 1950s New York School, have credited Gorky as a major source of inspiration.

Gorky was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, with fellow artists under thirty-five. Countless other exhibitions ensued, including a retrospective of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Menil Collection in Houston, in 2003, and another in 2009 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, traveling to the Tate Modern in London, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Gorky’s work is in numerous museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In a decade characterized by personal tragedy, Gorky took his own life in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1948. The Arshile Gorky Foundation was established by the artist’s family in 2005, with a mission to further develop and shape his lasting influence.