Artworks

An iconic seascape, Hot Moon, 1958, was completed during one of the richly creative summers spent by Milton Avery and his wife, Sally Michel, in Provincetown, Cape Cod, between 1957 and 1961. During this period, Avery rekindled his friendship with artist-colleagues Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, whom he had been a mentor to in the 1930s, and it is possible to see the rich, ongoing dialogue between Avery and the younger generation of abstract expressionist painters in this sublime nocturne. Works produced by the artist during this period, which also include Yacht Race in Fog, 1959, are regarded as among the most important of Avery’s career. It was during this period that Avery began working on a larger scale, and also completed major oils during the summer months, rather than waiting to paint from sketches and watercolours during winter in his New York studio. Sally Avery later reflected that the scaling-up of her husband’s canvases may have been following the example of Rothko, in particular. Avery’s works expanded from paintings previously measuring at most 40 x 50 inches to paintings but which then measured up to 60 x 70 inches (Hot Moon is among the largest, measuring 54 x 66 inches). This expansion of scale created greater potential for Avery to explore the impact of colour and the gestural treatment of paint. He also introduced a further reduction of compositional elements, a theme evident in his work since the 1930s, leading to some of the most lyrical works of his career. Hilton Kramer later characterised Avery’s Provincetown landscapes and seascapes as his “sublime achievement” but perhaps even more indicative of their importance is the response of Clement Greenberg who, on seeing the Provincetown works, completely revised his critical opinion of Avery, writing that “It is very difficult to begin to account for the quality of the best of these… It is not a question of technique or even style in the ultimate sense… 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 exactly what they alone have experienced. It has to do with how Avery locks his flat, lambent planes 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 pigments… Avery’s latest landscapes, done in Provincetown this past summer, attest to a new and more magnificent flowering of his art...” Hot Moon was first exhibited at HCE Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, (August 1958). The painting was considered significant enough to feature in MoMA’s survey exhibition, Milton Avery Paintings: 1941 – 1963, which opened in May 1965 (five months after that artist’s death) in New York, subsequently travelling to venues including The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. It also featured prominently in the exhibition Milton Avery at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (December 12, 1969 - January 30, 1970), which subsequently travelled to Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio.