Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hare

Arshile Gorkys Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hare from 1946 belongs to the artists extraordinary late drawings, created during the final and most fertile period of his career when he was producing the luminous abstractions that would influence Abstract Expressionism. The title suggests a landscape memory from Gorkys Armenian childhood, where young cherry trees might need protection from hares, but the drawing itself transforms any literal reference into a network of delicate lines and washes that hover between description and abstraction. The pen and ink lines wander across the gray paper like branches or veins, while touches of white and red watercolor add accents of light and warmth that suggest blossoms or blood with equal plausibility. Gorkys late drawings are among the most beautiful works on paper in 20th-century American art, combining the automatic drawing techniques he learned from Surrealism with a deeply personal imagery rooted in the landscape and loss of his Armenian homeland. The medium of this work, a drawing tipped into a book, suggests the intimacy and privacy of Gorkys drawing practice: these were not public statements but private meditations, explorations of form and memory that he trusted only to the most direct and unforgiving of mediums.

Gorkys late drawings are essential documents in the development of Abstract Expressionism, demonstrating how Surrealist automatism could be transformed through personal trauma and memory into a new kind of abstraction that was simultaneously automatic and deeply felt. His influence on de Kooning, Rothko, and Motherwell was profound.

An intimate late drawing by Gorky that transforms landscape memory from his Armenian childhood into a luminous network of line and wash, epitomizing the synthesis of Surrealist automatism and personal trauma that defined his contribution to Abstract Expressionism.