Artworks

‘It is sweet when on the great sea the winds trouble its waters... to see from what evils you are yourself exempt,’ the Stoic poet, Lucretius, writes in the second book of On the Nature of Things. Avery as a poet was what George Santayana called a philosophical poet, who saw the world with a kind of detachment, The calm is not the sea’s but his. His paintings transfer that calm to us. Arthur C. Danto (2004) p. 10 Breaking Sea was painted during Avery’s last summer on Cape Cod, a year after the oil painting, Breaking Wave, to which it is related in both motif and palette. The work on paper is filled with the passionate turbulence of a stormy sea, yet, as with all Avery’s seascapes, a monumental stillness is conveyed, as well. And the horizonless-ness of the composition invites us to ponder a kind of visual ambiguity of sea and sky. “The New England coast is different from that of southern France… This gets into Milton Avery’s paintings…Take clouds and wind. Take sea full of tidal motion and stirred by wind. Take beach as a base. All of these environments have in common the quality of shifting subtly from inch to inch. Any surface of wind-stirred water is in constant motion, constant change. We do not see a broad expanse of blue. We see rather a blue with endless variations, a blue field upon which different blues, or purples, or greens, or even reds, browns beiges and yellows extend themselves in smaller choppy areas created by the heave of the water, the passing of sun behind a cloud, the turning of the earth toward and away from the great light in the sky. All of these variations within what seems perfectly simplicity, all these are captures in Milton Avery’s paintings of the sea, captured and transmuted into something rare and fine – those are pearls that were his eyes – transmuted into art, with all its power to enhance our lives by the sudden vision of the everyday, familiar place seen under the aspect of eternity.” Frank Getlein, “Milton Avery” Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (1966)