Artworks

Highly abstracted, Morning Sky was painted the year following Avery’s last summer in Provincetown and reveals the rich, ongoing dialogue between Avery and a younger generation of artists, such as Mark Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, for whom he was a decisive influence and a guiding light. Since the 1930s, Avery had spent numerous summers in the company of Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman. During the summers of 1959-61, when Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb also vacationed in Provincetown, there was a significant coda to their reciprocal artistic dialogue of the 1930s. Sally Avery later reflected that the scaling-up of her husband’s canvases might have been due to the example of Rothko, in particular. Avery’s increasing forays to the “edge of abstraction”, as Clement Greenberg put it, also took place during this period. Milton Avery’s mentoring influence, during the 1930s, on the younger artists Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and to a lesser extent Barnett Newman (1905-1970), is undeniable and has been often written about. Newman owned a very minimal Avery canvas, Red Umbrella, 1945, now in the collection of Princeton University Art Museum (a gift of his widow). A later reciprocal influence or dialogue among these artists has been acknowledged but less explored. Edith Devaney writes of “the larger and more abstracted works of his friends giving Avery permission to push his own boundaries. Painting on a larger scale, Avery’s works become simultaneously bolder and increasingly ethereal.” [Devaney p. 18] To Avery’s late, abstract seascapes, in particular, among them Boathouse by the Sea, 1959, Blue Sea, Red Sky, 1958, Tangerine Moon and Wine Dark Sea, 1959, and Sea and Sand, 1957 (Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec) the influence of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting has been attributed. Just as works like White Moon, 1957 and Moon Path, 1958, seem related to Gottlieb’s Bursts, begun in 1956, Morning Sky evokes Gottlieb’s Imaginary Landscapes series, begun by 1953. Yet Avery did not work in series, in fact he resisted doing so, and Morning Sky reveals the expressive process of the artist’s hand--the making of art--in a work that is unique in his oeuvre. “Avery’s summers spent in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, from 1957 to 1961 confirm this sensitive response to his environment. Here the vast expanse of beach and sea find expression in his paintings, bringing an even more profound sensitivity to the works, with the colour and evocation of light pushing form to the very edges of abstraction. But the work of his friends, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, who were also spending the summers in the popular artists’ colony, would have played a part in this development too. With their studios in immediate proximity, they had plenty of opportunity to spend time together, to contemplate the light and the landscape and discuss how it affected their work. By this stage Rothko was painting his large-scale rectangles of floating colour, and Gottlieb his classic ‘Burst’ series. And so the three artists continued to play a part in each other’s creative output…” – Edith Devaney, from the forthcoming book Milton Avery, published by Victoria Miro.