The Liver Is the Cock's Comb

A mural-sized field of soft, teeming, half-organic shapes, drawn over washed and bled color, where Surrealism’s automatic hand and the Armenian gardens of Gorky’s memory turn into one of the seeds of Abstract Expressionism.

1. 1
   A field, not a scene

   The whole canvas: no horizon line, no ground, no single subject

   The first thing to register is what is missing. There is no horizon, no floor, no sky, no one thing the picture is "of." Instead the eye finds dozens of soft shapes scattered and clustered across a wide colored field, a swarm of growing things rather than a place. That refusal of a fixed scene, an all-over field with no center and no story, is half of what makes the picture point forward to Abstract Expressionism rather than back to Surrealist dream-illustration.
2. 2
   Drawing laid over color

   Across the surface: thin dark contour lines riding on top of the painted washes

   Thin, dark, nervous contour lines run on top of the color, not filled in by it. Gorky was a master draftsman, and here the drawing rides on the painting: line and paint are two separate layers, the line laid last. That carrying of a draftsman’s line straight into a large painting is one of the tells of his late method and one of the moves the next generation took from him.
3. 3
   Thin washes, stains and bleeds

   The colored ground, where edges run and the canvas shows through

   Much of the color is soft and watery, thinned so the weave of the canvas shows through, with edges that seep and run rather than sit in hard shapes. This is automatism left visible: accidents of the flowing paint allowed to stay, the unplanned bleed treated as part of the picture instead of something to tidy.
4. 4
   Organic and sexual forms, kept indefinable

   Throughout: petal-, organ-, flame- and limb-like shapes

   The shapes suggest fertility and the body: petals, organs, flames, limbs. The Buffalo AKG notes clear allusions to female and male genitalia. But every form stays ambiguous, never quite a flower, never quite an organ, and that ambiguity is the point. The picture is not a picture of something so much as growth and the body felt rather than depicted.
5. 5
   Bright passages against a quieter field

   Scattered hot accents of red and yellow against the more muted, washed surroundings

   A few hot, saturated notes (reds, yellows) flare out against the softer, washed-down field around them. Because so much of the canvas is muted, those small bright passages pull the eye and carry it across the long, wide surface, the way Gorky wanted you to travel the whole field rather than rest on one shape.
6. 6
   The mural scale

   The size itself: roughly 6 by 8 feet, the intimate marks blown up to a wall

   This is one of Gorky’s largest paintings, roughly 6 by 8 feet, mural-sized. The forms are intimate, doodle-like, the kind of mark you would make small and private; here they are blown up to the scale of a wall. That mismatch, a private organic mark at public monumental size, is part of why the canvas reads as a step toward Abstract Expressionism.