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. Apparently, during the early weeks of their first summer, it rained continuously, and Avery was daunted by the unrelieved greens of the Vermont landscape. “As time went on Avery became more and more attuned to the region’s subtle coloristic variety, and he experienced the chromatic symphonies of Vermont’s seasonal transitions, mastering an often delicate balance of simultaneously subdued and electric hues during the spring and summer months.” Franklin (2016) p. 34 For whatever confluence of reasons, during the Vermont years, Avery came to develop – most notably in his watercolours – a range of colour and mark that signaled a new breakthrough in his work. 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. In addition, “Telling parallels can be drawn between Bonnard’s landscapes of the 1930s and early 1940s, constructed from short daubs of often closely valued colors, Vuillard’s pattern-laden paintings, and Avery’s Vermont watercolors. All three artists create and ambiguous flattening of space within the expansive landscape motifs by means of strategic juxtapositions of color, and complex combinations of multiple graphic patterns arranged in contained but often overlapping of directly contiguous shapes.” 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.