Finders Keepers

Provenance:

The Artist

Serge and Barbara Chermayeff, New York, 1942-1946

Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York

Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York

The Collection of the Stare Family, purchased from the above, 1970

Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York 

Nancy Singer, Clayton, Missouri

Exhibited:

Chicago, Illinois, Museum of Contemporary Art, Twentieth-Century Drawings from Chicago Collections, September 15 -November 11, 1973 (as Untitled)

This work is recorded in the Arshile Gorky catalogue raisonné under entry no. D0921, as Untitled.

Lot Essay:

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes....Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.  

-- Arshile Gorky, (Armenian/American, 1904-1948) 

The Old Pirate, as described by Arshile Gorky to his gallerist, Julien Levy, was a mongrel dog who frequently traipsed into his yard. His crossings (and likely haggard looks) earned him his nickname. The problem with this, Levy would later note, was that at the time Gorky had no yard, nor any neighbors with dogs. The Pirate in question was then most likely a visitor of the farm belonging to Saul Schary in New Milford, Connecticut, where Gorky would spend several weeks at the end of 1942 and experience a major stylistic redirection evident throughout the remainder of his career.  

Indeed, there is a dog. Untitled (Study for the Pirate), 1942, features a wide-headed creature, all snarls and quizzical eyebrows, that would appear slightly camouflaged in the ensuing finished painting, The Pirate, and then appear again later in its companion work, an even more colorfully lucid The Pirate II.  

Gorky, born Vosdanik Adoian in the village of Khorkom, Armenia, suffered ethnic persecution following the Turkish invasion and fled to Russian-occupied territory. His mother died in front of him from starvation on a march in 1919. A year later, at sixteen, Gorky emigrated to the United States, though the loss and trauma he experienced in his formative years would critically influence him as an artist and human.  

In reinventing his identity, Gorky changed his name, claiming to be a Georgian noble and becoming increasingly vague about his year of birth. He was heavily influenced by the likes of Picasso, Cézanne, Matta, Léger, and Miró -- enough to be teased about the similarities in his work -- before finally arriving at his own signature style, a true master of reinvention in all senses. He gained the approval of André Breton, the self-appointed Father of Surrealism, and began spending time in rural Connecticut where he explored childhood memories and organic themes of camouflage and concealment. These new works contained mythical motifs, free-floating, loose biomorphic forms both anatomical and floral – and a frequent visitor, a certain old mongrel Pirate.  

The connection to Breton gave him the opportunity to obtain a contract with Julien Levy, who would remain his gallerist until Gorky’s untimely death. His work would come to be collected by notable institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Joseph H. Hirshhorn and Peggy Guggenheim, among others.  

After a brutal series of personal tragedies, Gorky died by suicide in 1948. His contributions to the art world and visual communication are difficult to overestimate. Though Gorky has been called the last Surrealist and first Abstract Expressionist, the sketches he prepared for his paintings were evidence of careful planning and a lack of spontaneous automatism that would have barred his true entry into either group. Instead, Gorky’s works sit somewhere in between, narrative and sensitive, careful in their honesty and evolving from an entirely new language of his own invention.