Armenia Remembered From a Distance

Gorky was born in the region around Lake Van, in what is now eastern Turkey, and emigrated to the United States as a young man in 1920. He never returned. Yet the landscape of his childhood became the most persistent subject of his career, recalled decades later and from thousands of miles away. The Garden in Sochi series, painted in the 1940s, is the clearest example. Sochi was the name of his father's orchard, and the paintings assemble its trees, its animals and its household objects into loose, floating forms.

What makes this subject unusual is that it is memory before it is landscape. Gorky was not painting a view in front of him. He was reconstructing a place through fragments, and the fragments distort as memories do. A tree becomes a shape. A tethered animal becomes a line. Readers who want the specific recurring forms will find them laid out in the guide to Gorky's most recognizable motifs Gorky's most recognizable motifs, which covers the symbols themselves rather than the subjects behind them.

The American Countryside He Adopted

The second major subject is closer to hand. From the mid 1930s Gorky spent summers in the countryside, first in Virginia and later in Connecticut, and these places supplied the material for his mature work. Water of the Flowery Mill, painted in 1944 and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, draws on the landscape along the Housatonic River in Connecticut. The subject is a real riverbank. The treatment dissolves it.

This is where the common themes in Gorky's paintings become easiest to see, because the American landscapes and the Armenian memories share a method. Both start from observed scenery and both end in forms that suggest plants, insects, water and anatomy without settling on any of them. The list below gathers the subject groups that recur across the whole career.

The distinction matters for anyone choosing a reproduction, because the two strands look different on a wall. The memory paintings tend toward warmer reds and yellows. The American landscapes run greener and cooler. A comparison of formats is covered separately in the guide to choosing between a canvas print and a framed poster canvas print or framed poster.

Early Portraits and Still Life

Before the abstractions, Gorky painted people and objects, and he painted them conservatively. Through the 1920s and 1930s he worked through the influence of Cezanne and Picasso, producing portraits of friends and family and still lifes that borrow their structure from Cubism. The Artist and His Mother, his best known early painting, occupied him for roughly a decade and exists in two versions. It is a portrait, and a double one, drawn from a photograph of himself as a child with his mother in Armenia.

These early subjects are easy to overlook because the late work is so much more famous. That is a mistake for anyone trying to understand him. The portraits and still lifes are where he learned compression, the habit of reducing a subject to its essential shapes, and that habit carries straight into the biomorphic paintings of the 1940s. The subjects changed less than the treatment did. A garden stayed a garden. It simply stopped looking like one. Readers curious about how the work reproduces in monochrome will find the question addressed in the piece on black and white Gorky prints black and white Gorky prints.