Arshile Gorky
The Artist’s Wife, Mougouch
1942
Scroll
Arshile Gorky
The Artist’s Wife, Mougouch
1942
Physical Qualities
Pen and brown and black ink with brush and brown and gray wash, Sheet: 351 x 238 mm. (13 13/16 x 9 3/8 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. I.W. Burnham II, for the Thomas E. Benesch Memorial Collection
Object Number
1963.110
Arshile Gorky is best known for his unique brand of Surrealist inspired abstraction (note his painting from 1946 on view in the adjoining exhibition), though he often worked figuratively to execute his portraits. The subject is his wife, Agnes Magruder (“Mougouch”), depicted the year that their first daughter was born. Here Gorky employs crosshatching for much of the figure and background, underlying the drawing with an energetic, chaotic feel, yet switches to a softer ink wash to describe the face and hands. Gorky conveys his wife’s calm and poise, reflecting the supportive and steadying figure she was in his life.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by gift, 1963; Mr. and Mrs. I.W. Burnham II, purchased from Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, NY, 1963; a New Jersey framer who traded frames for the drawing in the early 1940s, which Gorky removed from a sketch book
Select Views: Drawings from the Benesch Collection
Burlington Magazine, 107 (January 1965), p. 54, fig. 70.
Julien Levy, Arshile Gorky (New York: 1966), pl. 32.
BMA News, vol. XXIX, nos 3-4, 1967, p. 11, not illus.
Jim Jordan, Gorky: Drawings (NY, Knoedler: 1969), no. 58.
"The Thomas Edward Benesch Memorial Collection," BMA, 1970, unpaginated.
Kim S. Theriault, "Rethinking Arshile Gorky," University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, p. 59, fig. 18.
Carlson, Victor, and Carol Hynning Smith. Master Drawings and Watercolors of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Baltimore Museum of Art. New York, NY: The American Federation of Arts, 1979, pp. 143, ill.
Inscribed: lower right in graphite: "a. gorky"
