Artworks

This portrait of Sally Michel Avery captured while working on a portrait of Avery himself is a playful depiction of their creative partnership – each being painted by the other, a self-portrait within a portrait, a double-portrait of sorts. In the first decades of the marriage, it was through Sally’s work as a freelance illustrator that Avery was able to devote himself to painting full time. Early on in her career she had jobs illustrating for Macy’s department store, the magazine Progressive Grocer, and the Canon Towel Company; later her most consistent employment was illustrating the ‘Parent and Child’ column that appeared weekly in the New York Times, a job she held for most of two decades, from around 1940 to 1960. Avery’s respect for his wife is revealed in paintings, as well as drawings and watercolours, of Sally making her own art. Throughout their lives, they painted side-by-side. An earlier work, Female Artist, 1945, similarly shows Sally at work on a portrait of her husband (viewed from the back rather than in profile). As with that work, Artist Paints Artist seems to have given Avery license to have some fun with the dynamic of the composition – Sally solidly dominating the frame while Avery himself appears queasily green-faced, his hair jauntily windswept as if captured at speed. If a joke is being shared, one senses it is at Milton’s expense. As Sally said in a 1967 interview: ‘He was very understated in every way. But he had a marvelous sense of humor and he could never look at himself pompously… he did a great many self-portraits and they are so witty and so — I mean, when he looks at himself, it’s done with, you know, a twinkle in [his] eye. It’s just terrific.’ Speaking of her own frequent appearance in Avery’s work, in the catalogue for the 1989 exhibition My Wife Sally, My Daughter March, Sally is characteristically matter-of-fact: ‘Every variation in the household routine provided stimuli for new works. And looming large in the household I was the prime target as subject; standing at the easel or bent over the drawing board.’ Yet she goes on to underline the shared bond: “We were a family united, united by a passionate love for painting.”