Artworks

To me, Avery's singular qualities emerged most perceptibly in his later works, particularly his landscapes. In these there is a kind of fierce truth, a compelling candour, His analogies are apparent and absolutely just. The expression, for instance, of looming -- a sensation we all know well – is conveyed with a courage and sureness that marks an old master, When he painted the hulk of a... mountain, no intrusion of design of pictorial composing for its own sake, intervened with the directly apprehended emotion of the artist before the awesome forms of nature. Dore Ashton (1981) p. 18 In 1952, March, Sally, and Milton Avery travelled to Europe for the first, and for Avery the only, time. It was a three-month journey that included time in London, Wales, and the North and the South of France – including Paris, Beauvais, the Dordogne, Montauban, Noailles, Cavaillon, Silly-Tillard, Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, the Loire Valley, Chantilly, Miramar, Saint- Tropez, Aix-en-Provence, St. Rémy, Isère, Pampelonne, Les Baux-de-Provence, Nîmes, Vence, Dieppe, and Albi. Ingres in Montauban. They saw work by Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence; Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi; Van Gogh in St. Rémy; and Matisse in St-Tropez. The great European canvases painted after Avery’s return to New York include 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; and Parisian Cart, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and three works in the Victoria Miro exhibition: Excursion on the Thames, Seven White Cows and French Landscape. “In French Landscape…we witness a singular treatment of landscape--its hilly outcrops appearing simultaneously vast and somehow also intimate and accessible, a feat achieved through close colour harmony as much as Avery's distinct foreshortening of space. We know from one of Avery's sketchbooks that the view is based on Les Baux-de-Provence, located in the foothills of the Alpilles mountains in Provence. From that same sketchbook we learn that, while in the South of France, Avery also visited Saint-Tropez, Mont Sainte-Victoire and Aix-en-Provence. Perhaps tellingly, rather than painting a place immediately associated with Matisse, Cézanne or Van Gogh, he chooses one whose particularities of geography, geology and climate, perhaps, spoke more fully to his sensibility There's a deliberate haziness to this painting, evocative of the heat before a storm, a build-up of atmosphere where hot air meets cool, in which the trees of the foreground appear lighter than the hills behind them, almost ghost-like in appearance. It is a sublime distillation of time and place.” Martin Coomer p. 95 from the forthcoming book, Milton Avery, published by Victoria Miro.