Artworks

Three Cows and Old Mountain, both from 1943, at the end of his Vermont visits, are spatially flat. Figures are mere contours. These features link him to abstraction. But though Avery's closest friends were Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, all Abstract Expressionists, he hewed to recognizable subjects that accommodated the new vocabulary. His palette is certainly a subjective response to his subjects and here Avery draws from the Fauves, but he does not veer too far from the rich colors before him, and his dash marks coalesce into persuasive trees and cows. Nature cued him. Brian T. Allen, WSJ 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 use of pattern simultaneously is descriptive of specific visual phenomena and serves as a purely abstract, though very personal, visual shorthand used to represent the natural world. This can be seen in his renderings of the rocky outcroppings that dot the slopes of Ball and Little Ball Mountains in works such as...Old Mountain.” Franklin (2016) p. 36 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.