Artworks

In Seven White Cows, Avery corrals his subject matter within a scheme of broadly horizontal bands that denote rolling countryside. The painting is a sophisticated orchestration of positive and negative space, with this depicted herd appearing as bright negatives, and the groups of trees, their trunks and foliage rendered as a series of scraffito-like marks…to reveal lighter hues beneath the final, glowing earth tones. Martin Coomer p. 95 In 1952, March, Sally, and Milton Avery travelled to Europe for the first, and for Avery the only, time. It was a three-month journey that included time in London, Wales, and the South and the North of France – where they stopped in Paris, and also Beauvais, Chantilly and Silly- Tillard in the Oise, Picardy region, known for its agriculture and its dairy farms and pastures. One of the sketchbooks from Avery’s European trip, in the collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, includes an in situ sketch of cows at pasture in Silly-Tillard – the composition is the same, although much simplified and harmonised in the 1953 oil painting – the processional diagonal dividing foreground and middle distance, with the distant horizon line above. During the European summer, the Averys also visited the Lascaux caves – it was still possible to go into the caves before they closed to the public in 1963. In 1982, Sally recalled “I remember when we were in the Lascaux caves and we saw these things and elk on the wall, and they really looked like the kind of drawing Milton does.” The tonalities of Seven White Cows evoke those Paleolithic paintings.