Artworks

Avery’s still-lifes are a not inconsiderable part of his work from the 1920s to 1963 – perhaps his last still-life was a small 1963 painting, Lone Flower. It was a genre he approached seriously, but often also with both whimsy and tenderness. Avery usually depicted the still lifes that were a part of his home and studio environment, and therefore they reveal something of the domestic Avery. They may even stand in as a kind of portrait. While many of his still lifes are formally, even traditionally, posed, it was not unique for Avery to depict a disembodied object, floating ambiguously against the merest hint of a window or tabletop. He also simply painted leaves a number of times, especially in 1959 and 1960, singly or in pairs, treating them as semi-abstract forms. Vine has a relationship, both in palette and motif, to Avery’s painting Window Plants, also 1955. Both are depicted with an especially lyrical and delicate grace, and Vine is almost musical in the dance of its leaf forms. In it, Avery marries rhythmic form and chromatic harmony, the play of blue against grey creating a ‘dance’ on the surface of the painting that is further enhanced by the repeated leaf forms. The analogy to music in Avery’s art has been written about on a number of occasions. In 1938, Marsden Hartley wrote, “Avery is a kind of musician in his own right.” And in his 1936 commentary, Henry McBride compared one of Avery’s watercolors to “a sheet of Chinese music.” Simplification – a reduction of form and palette – in Avery’s art of the 1950s has been attributed in part to his deteriorating health. Avery suffered a major heart attack in 1949. When he was able to return to painting, Sally recalls: “Life became much more important because he had almost lost it. He began to look for different things. I think the very simple things he did were the result of having experienced such a dramatic event in his life. It scared him. It quickened the direction of his work – the colors became more sparse, his forms were more simplified.” – Marla Price, quoted in Cheryl Brutvan, Milton Avery Works on Paper (Williamstown, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1980). In the 1952 catalogue essay for Avery’s retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Frederick S. Wight wrote the following passage. It was an essay particularly admired for its beauty by Sally Avery. “So here we are with an outer world given back to us, or perhaps held over, for though it is new to the eye it is not new in American experience, at least in New England. It is a transcendental world fenced round by conscience, a field in which serenity can grow in a pale light. Emerson has brooded here – what he saw is another matter. But Emily Dickinson came nearer seeing this world. ‘The shadows lengthen on the lawn, indicative that suns go down.’ This quietude has its tensions, but they are under control. To describe Avery as a lyric poet in the New England tradition suggests an air plant, yet there is soil and sap.” – Frederick S. Wight (1952) p. 5 It is hard to experience Vine – the disembodied subtlety of its light, its quietude, without wondering whether Avery was responding to Wight, reciprocating with just that, a metaphorical “air plant”.