Artworks

Avery was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 1953, 1954 and 1956, and the Averys spent the Summer of 1955 at Yaddo. In later interviews, Sally Avery shared vivid recollections of their encounters with Thornton Wilder, Marcel Duchamp, James Baldwin, May Swenson, Marian MacDowell and others. The New Hampshire countryside, in particular, inspired Avery, and those years are replete with his explorations of its trees and wooded landscapes. Both Mountains and Trees and the related 1955 oil painting by the same title, are “similar compositions of softly textured horizontal bands with foreground friezes of calligraphic tree forms.” (Marla Price, The Paintings of Milton Avery, 1982) While Avery’s art often hovered at the verges of abstraction, he never entirely departed from the direct inspiration of nature. “Avery stood for a certain value that many other painters felt they had lost. It was the concept of nature embracing the artist, not alienating him – an organic concept in which the artist feels continuous with what he surveys, and in which the abstracting intelligence never oversteps the natural boundaries. The idea had a long and generous history in which both artists and poets shared, particularly toward the end of the nineteenth century when German estheticians emerged with the doctrine of Einfühlung, or empathy. Avery clearly stood within that great romantic tradition.” Dore Ashton, Avery in Mexico and After (1981).