Artworks

The Averys spent their first summer in Vermont’s Green Mountain and Finger Lakes area in 1935, and returned there five times between 1936 and 1943. Some summers Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb were there, as well as the art historian Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian Milgram—the Averys’ neighbors in Greenwich Village—who had purchased a home in Rawsonville in 1933. The Averys summered in Southern Vermont, in Jamaica or nearby Rawsonville. For whatever confluence of reasons, during the Vermont years, Avery came to develop – most notably in his watercolors – a range of color and mark that signaled a new breakthrough in his art. It would not be amiss to compare the endlessly varied calligraphy of his Vermont ink drawings – often copiously annotated with color notes – to the drawings of Vincent Van Gogh. “Avery’s diverse, highly stylized handling of trees is reminiscent of children’s or folk art in its simplicity of means..., yet his trees always seem to suggest in their abstraction specific qualities of one species or even of a unique specimen – for example...the many permutations of calligraphic conifers with their distinctive pyramidal cones of parallel lines or zigzagging branches full of needles in Three Cows.” Franklin (2016) p. 37 The first exhibition of Avery’s Vermont watercolors, painted during the summer of 1935, was held at Valentine Gallery early in 1936. A number of the great 1943 watercolors were presented at Paul Rosenberg Gallery in the fall of that year. A retrospective, Milton Avery’s Vermont was recently held at the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont.