The short window, then Buffalo

This picture sits inside a window that did not stay open long. The years 1943 to 1947 were Gorky’s breakthrough, the stretch in which he finally painted as himself. Then a cascade of disasters closed over him in barely two years. In 1946 a fire in his studio destroyed many of his works. Around the same time came a diagnosis of rectal cancer and the surgery that followed. In 1948 a car accident broke his neck and, for a time, paralyzed his painting arm. His marriage broke down. On 21 July 1948, at roughly forty-four, Gorky hanged himself in Sherman, Connecticut, leaving the chalked words “Goodbye My Loveds.” The 1944 canvas was painted, then, in the last clear light before all of that.

The painting’s life as an object, its provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work, in order, from the artist’s hand to now), is short and clean. From Gorky it went into the collection of Jean Lamson Hebbeln, and then to the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, one of the central dealers of the new American painting. On 13 March 1956 the picture was acquired by the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo as the Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr. (accession K1956:4). Knox was the museum’s great modern-art patron, the man who funded much of its postwar collection. The Albright Art Gallery later became the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and after a 2023 expansion the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where the canvas hangs today.

A word on why this picture is reproduced small here. It is still under copyright: Gorky painted it in 1944, and a published work of that era holds US copyright for about ninety-five years from publication, which keeps this one protected through roughly 2040. (The term is keyed to the publication date, not the artist’s death, so Gorky’s death in 1948 does not free it.) The rights are actively held by the Gorky estate (© Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society, New York). So unlike the older paintings in these readings, which have passed into the public domain, this one is shown small and credited to the Buffalo AKG and the estate, for the purpose of talking about it. The teeming field is free to grow without end; the picture of it is not quite free in the same way.

What Gorky left, in the few good years before the fall, is the door. The Liver Is the Cock’s Combis the canvas most often used to show the turn, the picture where Surrealism’s free hand and the gardens of a lost homeland become a wide, mural-sized field of pure organic life, and where the next great American movement finds one of its beginnings. The man was gone at forty-four. The field he painted is still teeming.