Audio Stop 21

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Abstracted forms are painted in grass green, black, pepper red, butter yellow, tawny beige, rose pink, and a few touches of ocean blue in this horizontal composition. The paint is applied thinly, almost like watercolor wash. Translucent layers of paint drip down the canvas and knit the colors and shapes together. Most of the forms create a roughly pyramidal shape at the center. Some are vaguely square-shaped while others are oval, circular, or triangular. Many of the forms are outlined in black, and some have spots of color at their centers. For instance, a cluster of shapes near the lower right includes two canted parallelograms outlined with black. One has an emerald-green oval at its center and the other a black oval. Other shapes in that area include a rust-red triangle, a solid black anvil-shaped form, and a butternut-orange circle surrounded by vibrant yellow. A caramel-brown area spans the bottom edge of the canvas. The artist signed and dated the lower left corner, “A. Gorky 44.”

Arshile Gorky

One Year the Milkweed, 1944

East Building, Upper Level — Gallery 407-B

In One Year the Milkweed, one of several so-called color veil paintings Arshile Gorky made in 1944, films of paint have been washed unevenly across the canvas, and evocative but indistinct forms have been brushed in. The painting’s overall green and brown hues suggest a landscape, but there are no identifiable landscape forms and no spatial recession. Instead, vertical drips and the alternation of light and deep tones create a shifting, shimmering effect across the entire picture surface.

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