Artworks

In 1973, Milton Avery’s dealer, Grace Borgenicht, began a series of five annual exhibitions juxtaposing his work with that of modern European artists; the first in the series was the The Still Life: Avery and the European Masters, followed by the Figure, the Landscape, the Seascape, and finally the Nude. The object of these ambitious exhibitions was not to show Avery’s sources in the European modernists so much as to establish his place as their peer. In 1928 and 1929, Avery had painted two major canvases titled White Pitcher. If anything, the 1928 painting might have its lineage in Cézanne. The 1929 canvas is already bristling with Avery’s individuality – his particular time and place, as a 1929 issue of Creative Art magazine, and a loaf of Wonder Bread (before it was sold pre-sliced in 1930) on the table tell us. And the vase in that painting also reappears in Carrots and Fancy Vase, c. 1929. Avery frequently used similar titles for paintings as he returned to re-work motifs over the course of his career. There are four still life paintings simply called Objects (1927, c. 1929, 1941, 1949); three paintings have the title Still Life with Bottles (1942, 1944, 1949) (and one of those, in turn, has its exact compositional precedent in a much earlier work, Still Life with Spoon, 1929). The composition of the 1949 painting, Vases is reiterated in the later Three Vases. A study could be made of Avery’s thematic variations. It is certainly interesting to observe Avery’s stylistic evolution from those much earlier works to White Pitcher of 1946. The blanched, thinly painted still life is close to monochrome, its flattened forms locked into a perfectly harmonious play of positive and negative space. As Andrew Lambirth has commented, “Only with White Pitcher of 1946 does serenity return, the comfortably rotund vase completed and enhanced by its complement of flowers however snakily undulant their stems. This is a beautifully simple painting, cool and tranquil, but optimistic in mood rather than detached.” Lambirth (2007) p. 5