Artworks

I do see him far more often at his highest and broadest and strongest in his landscapes and seascapes…. It is very difficult even to begin to account for the quality of the best of these…It is not a question of technique or even of style in the ultimate sense; nor is it one of sensibility or taste… It is a question rather of the sublime lightness of Avery’s hand and of the morality of his eyes: their invincible and exact loyalty to what they alone have experienced. It has to do with exactly how Avery locks his flat, lambent panes together; with the exact dosage of light in his colors…; with exactly how he manages to keep his pictures cool in key even when using the hottest pigment; with the exact way in which he infuses warm colors with coolness, and vice versa; with exactly how he inflects planes into depth without shading— and so on ad infinitum. Nature is flattened and aerated in Avery’s landscapes, but not deprived in the end of its substantiality… The painting floats but it also coheres and stays in place, as tight as a drum and as open as light. Through the unreal means most proper to pictorial art – the flat plane parallel to the surface – Avery is able to convey the integrity of nature… Clement Greenberg, “Milton Avery”, Arts (1957) It has been commented how the similar formal means used by Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and even Barnett Newman, during the years of Avery’s Provincetown summers (1957-1961) allows for a comparison of their work, and also the suggestion of a dialogue, or even reciprocal influence by the younger artists on their mentor and friend. The composition of Blue Sea, Red Sky and the related, fully-developed painting on paper, Red Sky, Blue Sea, both painted in 1958, are seen as have a particularly close relationship to the work of Mark Rothko. And it is true that rarely had Avery worked so abstractly. It is interesting to recall, however, that the composition was conceived in a small, much earlier (1953) oil crayon drawing, Sand, Sea & Sky. It may be more interesting to consider these late, abstract seascapes as a kind of response to Clement Greenberg’s outstanding essay on Milton Avery, of 1957, published in Arts magazine – all the artists were considering Greenberg at that time. But it is perhaps most meaningful to look at this trio of works in and of itself, as an unparalleled record of the artist’s process, culminating in one of the iconic paintings of his later years. At each phase, and each medium, we see Avery’s vision fully realised. As Hilton Kramer later observed, “many of these works on paper have the strength – the absolute purity of form and expression – we usually think of as the special quality of Avery’s larger works on canvas. Avery often based his larger works on these smaller pictures first executed on paper, yet there is nothing tentative or unfinished about them. Each is a carefully conceived, wholly realized work of art in its own right.” Hilton Kramer New York Times (January 8, 1972)