Artworks

The Averys’ daughter March, a painter, married the scholar and photographer Philip G. Cavanaugh in 1954. This painting of the couple is imbued with quietude – Philip reading aloud to March at the Averys’ Central Park West home and studio. It is one of Avery’s last large-scale canvases. The scene has layered associations – as Sally later recalled, ‘Milton always read… he liked reading out loud. He used to read me poetry a lot… He read aloud a great deal. I remember once he read Don Quixote aloud [and] Swann’s Way.’ As far back as the late 1920s, Avery returned regularly to painting deeply harmonious, intimate scenes of figures in dialogue, some of which are portraits of husbands and wives. They include The Artist and His Wife, 1928-29, Conversation in Studio, 1943 (Art Institute of Chicago), Two Figures at Desk, 1944 (Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, State University of New York), Husband and Wife, 1945 (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), Three Figures on a Settee, 1947 (Collection of Edward Albee), Poetry Reading, 1957 (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute), Interlude, 1960 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Two Figures II, 1963 (Milwaukee Art Museum), and Two Poets, 1963. Despite the atmosphere of intimacy in Young Couple, Barbara Haskell has written that Avery ‘was less interested in conveying emotions related to particular circumstances or people or in revealing insights about existing relationships in nature than in creating harmonious compositions... Avery was attracted to what he was painting not for its specific content, but for its potential formal, coloristic, and spatial relationships. He painted whatever was there – the place or person did not matter to him. According to Sally, he was no more attached to her or to March as subject matter than to anyone else who might have been around... he focused not on the emotional interaction of figures but on formal relationships; the psychology of the figures-- and his emotional reaction to them – was ultimately subservient to the total design. Thus Avery’s paintings, while serving as an inventory of where he was and who and what he saw, do not reveal the emotional nuances of his life. What they reveal is a mood. When one thinks of an Avery painting, one thinks of a world of low-key emotions from which anger and anxiety are absent. His paintings are imbued with a sense of contentment and harmony; nature is not threatening, but is at peace with man; domestic scenes are calm; figures are in repose. Order prevails, as do serenity and restraint, all of which reflected Avery’s own personality and the kind of life Sally had made possible.’ Barbara Haskell (1982) p. 157-58