Artworks

“…composed of a single, candescent field of color from which the images of the boats emerge as if through a dense haze…the difference in hue between field and image is breathtakingly subtle and daring.” Marla Price, The Paintings of Milton Avery (1982) The Averys began summering in Provincetown in 1957, and went back each year, through October of 1960. During these summers, Avery began working on a larger scale, and also completed major oils during the summer months, rather than waiting to paint them in his New York studio from summer sketches and watercolours. During those summers, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb also vacationed in Provincetown, and, there was a significant coda, during that period, 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. It is not often that a specific verbal account has been left about the circumstances of Avery's creative work. However, there is an unpublished recollection by Provincetown painter, Tony Vevers (1926-2008), describing the moment that inspired Yacht Race in Fog: “One sunny Saturday, in the late 50s, the Averys invited my wife, Elspeth, and me up to their second floor deck on their Commercial Street apartment in Provincetown. We sat there, overlooking the harbor. Way off, up the west end, the regular Saturday small sailboat race was visible skimming out into the sea like a flock of seagulls. Suddenly, a massive cloud of fog appeared to the Northwest, behind the fleet of sailboats. Within minutes, the boats were swallowed up by the dense cloud. The rapidity and finality of the action was scary, and we all voiced the hope that the boats and their crews would come through safely. When I saw (for the first time) Avery's oil painting Yacht Race in Fog I realized that the extraordinary occurrence that we had witnessed from the Avery's summer place must have resonated in Milton's painterly mind as a subject that he later captured with such an economic mastery.” Tony Vevers, May 9, 2002 (unpublished letter) A preliminary sketch for Yacht Race in Fog, dated 1958, is still in the Avery family's collection. And Avery also painted a related 1959 watercolor, Sails in Fog, now in a private collection.