Artworks

This painterly Cape Cod watercolour, made during the height of Avery’s Provincetown period, was composed the same summer as the great classical canvases, Dunes and Sea I (Carnegie Museum of Art), Dune Bushes (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth), Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (The Museum of Modern Art), and Yellow Sky (Tate). Avery cleansed his palate, so to speak, with this radically free and abstracted composition, depicting dancing light on water, in which waves break upon a foreground shore of unpainted paper. To adapt a text by Arthur C. Danto, the freedom of the expressionist brush conveys the living surface of water as we really see it on a windy day, the nested irregular curves registering the way nature regiments the procession of waves, while the yellow washes capture the wateriness of the waves’ bodies and white strokes are transformed into their crests and spume, and the color of the paper contributes a unifying tone. Arthur C. Danto (2004) p. 8 In his 1962 monograph, Hilton Kramer wrote of Avery: “Avery is a master at distinguishing retinal impressions, particularly in natural light; and he seems always to be able to reproduce on his canvas an exact retinal sensation. If one compares him to past masters in this sphere – to Monet and Bonnard, for example – it is clear that, unlike them, Avery is interested less in the fleeting quality of the sensation than in the painterly means by which its existential quiddity, its permanence in experience, can most effectively be set down. It is not the changing character of the visual that interests him so much as its firm, momentary presence. And it is precisely this absorption in the permanence of his impressions that allows Avery to project, without bombast or rhetoric, a monumentality that is real, that refers in the end to something beyond the sensations of which it is composed.” Hilton Kramer (1962) p. 21