The Plough and the Song

Arshile Gorky, influenced by Surrealism and European modernism, was one of the principal artists in in the 1930s-'40s to launch the New York School. This major painting, The Plough and the Song, is one of five painted versions of the theme, two of which were destroyed in a fire in 1946. The painting, thinly done and with the use of turpentine to further thin the pigment, gives a great sense of transparency and light in relation to the other surviving versions (in the Art Institute of Chicago, and a private collection). The AMAM also has a preparatory drawing of 1944, one of three known of the same theme (others are in the National Gallery of Art and the Harvard Art Museum). The drawing was part of the artist's initial explorations of landscape, the first since his arrival in the United States twenty years before.

Both the drawing and the painting speak to Gorky's nostalgia for his childhood home in Armenia-its countryside, gardens, and fields-and for his parents. In December 1944, he wrote his sister that he had carved a wooden plough as gift to his nephew, mentioning the "fertility of forms that leap from our Armenian plows." Gorky saw the plough as his birthright from his father, who had worked the fertile Armenian land, and the "song" as symbolic of his mother, who had taught him to love religious and folk songs before dying of starvation in 1919, during the Armenian genocide. The title is also reminiscent of the ploughing songs that workers sang in the fields to control the oxen.

While individual forms in both works can be hard to discern, a study of all of the known versions of both painting and drawing, as well as other Gorky compositions, points toward a vertical figure at left and a female torso at upper right (both of which appear as mere smudges in the ethereal Oberlin painting), as well as a toppled haystack, ploughs, and flowers.