Artworks

Following his second heart attack in October 1960, Milton Avery remained in a very fragile state of health until his death in January 1965. Nevertheless, he and Sally were able to spend the summer of 1962 in the village of Lake Hill, in the Catskill mountains, the locale of Wader. In his late work, he never stopped pushing forward with experimentation and change. While he returned more explicitly to figuration, it was executed with an increasingly radical and loose painterliness. During his final years, he also painted numerous large oils on paper, which include a series of black-and-white monochromes. The palette of Wader, however, is poignantly vivid, its complementary hues evoking a haze of summer heat. The question of “Late Style” (in general) has been the subject of thoughtful writing by Theodor Adorno, Edward Said and others. Of Avery’s final period of work, Barbara Haskell wrote in the catalogue for the 1982 Milton Avery retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art: “...Avery’s late paintings evoke the tenderness that people near death often feel for the familiar and ordinary. From the beginning, his method of working – from sketches to watercolors to finished painting – involved a kind of looking back, which forced him to draw upon and reassess recollections of experiences or places. Consequently, his portrayals are imbued with the kind of intensity William Carlos Williams alluded to when he wrote that ‘there is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.’ Toward the end of Avery’s life a quality of detachment and nostalgia overlaid his visual memories, as if he were looking back not at specific events, places, or people, but at life itself. In part, Avery achieved this through radically muted color and pictorial distancing. The device of aerial perspective...and... the frequent placement of images in the middle ground rather than in the foreground of the canvas served to separate the image from Avery’s, as well as from the spectator’s, space – creating the sensation that the scene was being viewed from afar. By combining these techniques with the veiled, slightly mottled softness of his colors, Avery placed his subjects at an enigmatic distance.” Barbara Haskell (1982) pp. 164, 169