Milton Avery
Excursion on the Thames, 1953
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 127 cm
40 x 50 in
40 x 50 in
Avery’s only painting of London, Excursion on the Thames results from his sole trip to Europe in 1952. It is painted from a sketch made by the artist on the steps of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) at Millbank (a fine work on paper of the subject is also in the VM Mayfair show). In a short film by Warren Forma (1963), Avery recalls: “I was visiting the Tate museum and got tired and went outside for a few minutes and saw this excursion boat and made this small sketch, and when I got back to New York City I painted a big canvas from it.”
During the summer of 1952 Avery, aged 67, accompanied by Sally Michel and their nineteen-year-old daughter March, visited Europe for the first time… London, Paris and the French Riviera, spending a week in each place. Evidently it was a fruitful trip. Several important works by the artist were completed as a result, including March on the Balcony (March at Saint-Tropez), The Phillips Collection; The Seine, Whitney Museum of American Art; Bicycle Rider by the Loire, Flint Institute of Arts; Parisian Cart, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; as well as three works included in Victoria Miro’s exhibition: French Landscape, 1953, Seven White Cows, 1953, and Excursion on the Thames, whose arrangement of horizontal bands – those of the river and its embankments echoed in the schematised boat itself – anticipates the formal and chromatic distinctions of Avery’s final works.
In an essay for the catalogue published on the occasion of Avery’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982, Barbara Haskell refers to a conversation with March Avery Cavanaugh about the 1952 trip. Avery’s daughter remembers her father “feeling too weak to both visit museums and sketch outdoors; given the choice, he decided that museum visits were more exhausting and less productive than sketching.” Standing on the steps of the Tate, Avery seems to enact that very decision.
“Perhaps, though, it is not too fanciful to imagine his act of stepping out of the museum and into the London daylight, sketchbook in hand, as possessing symbolic significance, as well. Avery, by that time regarded as the most significant figure bridging American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, in addition to offering an attendant link between the School of Paris of Picasso and Matisse and American art, was avowedly his own man, pivotal in the development of twentieth-century American art yet always choosing to stand outside of its dominant tropes and isms. ‘I never have any rules to follow,’ Avery stated, “I follow myself.”
Furthermore, despite ill health, he was still to make some of his finest works, images that would investigate new ideas, further refine his visual vocabulary and develop his very singular vision: the “gripping lyricism”8 so admired by Rothko. We see this in Excursion on the Thames, where Avery’s increasing tendency to simplify and condense, and also to lighten experience, finds fitting subject matter in a scene of urban recreation compressed into three bands of colour. How apposite that the vessel he chooses for the central band of this painting should be a pleasure boat. Just as he paints an image of leisure, Avery is always eager to remove conspicuous traces of his own effort, to play down the absolute sophistication of vision that underpins his painting.” – Martin Coomer, from Milton Avery in Europe – The Summer of ’52 in the forthcoming book, Milton Avery, published by Victoria Miro.
Exhibitions
Milton Avery, The Modern, Fort Worth, TX, November 7, 2021 – January 30, 2022; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, March 5 – June 5, 2022; traveling to the Royal Academy of Arts, July 15 – October 16, 2022
Milton Avery, Victoria Miro, London, June 7 - July 29, 2017
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, (organized by American Federation of Arts, traveling). Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, November 30, 2001 - January 27, 2002
Milton Avery: Major Paintings 1929-1962, Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, March 13 - April 12, 1999
Milton Avery: A Singular Vision, Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL, February 7 - April 10, 1988
Milton Avery, (organized by Whitney Museum of American Art, traveling). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, September 16 - December 5, 1982
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX, August 28 - October 4, 1981
The University of Texas Art Museum, Austin, TX, December 5, 1976 - February 6, 1977
Milton Avery in Mexico and After, (organized by Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico, traveling).
Milton Avery, Drawings & Paintings, (organized by The University of Texas Art Museum, traveling).
Paintings by Milton Avery and His Family, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA, September 4 - September 26, 1971
Milton Avery, Gallery Reese Palley, San Francisco, CA, 1968
Milton Avery Memorial Exhibition, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, NY, September 10 - September 22, 1965
Milton Avery Memorial Exhibition, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, NY, September 10 - September 22, 1965
Milton Avery: An Exhibition of Paintings, The Richmond Artists Association at The Carrillon Byrd Park, Richmond, VA, February 4 - February 25, 1962
Milton Avery, (organized by American Federation of Arts, traveling). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, February 3 - March 13, 1960
Milton Avery ‘53-’54, (organized by Grace Borgenicht Galery). Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY, March 29 - April 17, 1954
Publications
Milton Avery ‘53-’54, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY (1954). #1. Illustrated p. 61
Kramer, Hilton. Milton Avery: Paintings 1930-1960, Thomas Yoseloff, New York (1962). Plate VII
Milton Avery: An Exhibition of Paintings, The Richmond Artists Association, Richmond, VA (1962). p. 10
Blanch, Arnold. Milton Avery Memorial Exhibition, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, NY (1965). p. 9
Mellow, James R., Mark Rothko, et al. Milton Avery, Gallery Reese Palley, San Francisco, CA (1968). P. 10.
Getlein, Frank. Paintings by Milton Avery and His Family, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA (1971). p. 19
Miller, Harvey S. Shipley and Earl A. Powell, III. Milton Avery, Drawings & Paintings, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX (1976). Listed p. 54
Ashton, Dore, Salvador Elizondo, et al. Milton Avery in Mexico and After, Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico, Mexico City (1981). Illustrated p. 61
Grad, Bonnie Lee and Sally Michel Avery. Milton Avery, Strathcona, Royal Oak, MI (1981). Plate 23; mentioned in the text pp. 4, 10, 11.
Haskell, Barbara. Milton Avery, Whitney Museum of American Art with Harper & Row, New York, NY (1982). Figure 107, p. 132; listed p. 224.
Price, Marla June. The Paintings of Milton Avery, UMI, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI (1982). Fig. 194
Chernow, Burt and Sally Michel Avery. Milton Avery: A Singular Vision, ed. Brenda Williamson. Center for the Fine Arts Association, Miami, FL (1987). #18; illustrated p. 33
Milton Avery: Major Paintings 1929-1962, Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ (1999). Listed p. 32; illustrated p. 17
Hobbs, Robert, Clement Greenberg, et al. Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. & The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY (2001). Plate 18, p. 45; p. 104
Ratcliff, Carter. Milton Avery: Art For Our Sake, Art & Antiques, (July 2015). p. 73
Milton Avery, essay by Edith Devaney. London: Victoria Miro, 2017, illustrated, n.p. Wajahat, Waqas. p. 115
Devaney, Edith, Monroe, Erin and Price, Marla. Milton Avery. London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2021, illustrated, p. 8
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