A field with no horizon
The first thing the picture does is refuse to give you a scene. There is no horizon line, no floor, no sky, no single object the painting is “of.” A traditional picture hands you a place to stand in. This one hands you a wide colored field with dozens of soft shapes scattered and clustered across it, and lets you wander. Read it as a swarm of growing things rather than a place. The eye has nowhere fixed to land, which is the point: the whole surface is alive and equally weighted, edge to edge.
The shapes themselves are biomorphic, a useful word that just means “shaped like living things”: soft, rounded, organic forms that suggest bodies, plants and organs without being any of them exactly. There are petal-like forms, flame-like forms, limb-like and organ-like forms, drifting and overlapping. The Buffalo AKG notes that some carry clear allusions to female and male genitalia, and the picture is frankly about fertility and the body. Yet every shape stays just shy of being nameable: never quite a flower, never quite an organ. That deliberate indefiniteness is not failure or shyness. It is the subject. Gorky wanted growth and the body felt, not catalogued.
The surface tells you how it was made. Much of the color is thin and watery, washed on so the canvas shows through, with edges that run, seep and bleed rather than sit in hard outlines. Over that soft flooded ground rides a separate layer: thin, dark, nervous drawn lines, the draftsman’s contour laid on top of the painting rather than filled in by it. Those two layers, the wash below and the drawing above, are the meeting of Gorky’s free unconscious hand and his trained one.
Finally, the color. The field is mostly soft and muted, but a few hot accents, reds and yellows, flare out against the quieter surroundings. Because so much of the canvas is washed-down and pale, those small bright passages carry real weight: they pull the eye and walk it across the long, wide surface. Taken in whole, at mural scale, the doodled, intimate forms become a single teeming wall of growth. There is no scene, no story, no fixed thing. There is a field, and it is full of life.