Arshile Gorky

After Gorky’s exhibition in San Francisco closed, Noguchi remained in California while the couple traveled back to New York. On their way, they stopped in Virginia City, Nevada, where they married in September 1941, and then honeymooned along the Yuba River in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Upon their return to New York City that October, Gorky created works inspired by their travels, rendering new contours and colors that would stir memories from his early years. It was during this period that he painted the masterful ‘Untitled (Mojave)’ (1941), its vivid palette reflecting the desert’s stark intensity. Prior to traveling west, Gorky had been working on a series that referenced his upbringing in Khorkom; immediately after his return, this work crystallized into his breakthrough Garden in Sochi series, which presaged his later celebrated abstract landscapes. According to Mougouch, Gorky painted the final surface of his masterful green ‘Garden in Sochi,’ now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on the night they returned to New York.

Over the ensuing years, Gorky continued to seek solace and inspiration in the natural world, often deploying landscape motifs to express emotional undercurrents and fragmented childhood memories. Between 1943 and 1946, he spent extended periods at Crooked Run Farm, the Virginia homestead owned by his wife’s parents. There, he produced numerous drawings ‘en plein air,’ channeling his immediate bodily responses to the environment through automatic drawing and free association. ‘I do not paint in front of, but from within nature,’ he explained. The resulting works, including ‘Untitled (From a High Place II)’ (1946), signal a profound reawakening of his connection to the landscape.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, Gorky’s travels catalyzed shifting perspectives, both literal and psychological. By bringing the artist’s transcontinental road trip into focus, ‘Horizon West’ invites visitors into the eye and mind of a 20th-century visionary. It offers insight into what compelled Gorky to ‘look into the grass,’ toward the micro, the intimate and the worlds once lost to memory, where his observations of the physical landscape coalesced into an indelibly provocative visual cosmos.