Untitled

Untitled — Arshile Gorky. 1943.

Medium: Wax crayons and colored crayon and graphite with scraping and incising, on ivory wove paper. Dimensions: 57.8 × 73.6 cm (22 13/16 × 29 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

In July 1943, Arshile Gorky vacationed in the foothills of the Appalachians, at the Virginia farm of his wife’s parents. There he devoted himself to drawing outdoors, developing a vocabulary of leaf, seed, and pod shapes from the lush mid-summer landscape. Drawn with obvious passion, this work, with its essentially joyous riot of color, provides little indication of the suffering and despair of Gorky’s last years, which eventually caused him to take his own life.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.