Artworks

‘We were always his admiring audience. Mainly we were always there, ready to be the source of new arrangement of colors and forms; ready to personalize a landscape.’ – Sally Michel Avery (1988) Bathers and beachgoers are staples of Avery’s art, and coastal scenes, sometimes populated by his family and friends, occur throughout his career. Writing in the catalogue for the 1971 exhibition Paintings by Milton Avery and his Family, Frank Getlein places Avery squarely among a lineage of coastal painters: ‘In terms of subject matter, Avery was one of the greatest and perhaps the last of the seashore painters, a tradition that finds its roots in Claude Lorraine and Constable but that really established itself with Boudin and Homer, working at about the same time in France and the United States.’ The Averys spent numerous summers by the coast: in Gloucester, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, between 1920 and 1945, and later, between 1957 and 1960, Provincetown, where Avery, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb worked in each other’s company, rekindling an association that began in the 1930s. A degree of reciprocity between Avery and the Abstract Expressionists, who found such a potent example in his work, is strikingly apparent in works produced in Provincetown years. It was in Provincetown that Avery suffered a second major heart attack, in October 1960, returning to New York by ambulance (too frail to attend the opening of his Whitney Museum retrospective earlier that year, the family instead headed to Key West, Florida, to avoid the winter chill, on the advice of Avery’s doctors.) While Sally arranged for them to spend the summers of 1962 and 1963 in Lake Hill, New York (north of Woodstock), life for the main part became confined to the apartment on Central Park West, with only occasional walks in the park. It is certain, therefore, that Sally by the Sea, 1962, was completed back in New York, perhaps from an earlier sketch. Throughout his career, Avery’s habit was to devote his summers to drawing and making watercolours, which would serve as the basis for the oil paintings he worked on during the winters back in New York – a routine that goes some way in explaining his art’s sense of endless summer. His fragile state of health lends an additional poignancy to these late works, which often have the air of warm recollections. As Barbara Haskell writes: ‘...Avery’s late paintings evoke the tenderness that people near death often feel for the familiar and ordinary. From the beginning, his method of working – from sketches to watercolors to finished painting – involved a kind of looking back, which forced him to draw upon and reassess recollections of experiences or places. Consequently, his portrayals are imbued with the kind of intensity William Carlos Williams alluded to when he wrote that “there is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.” Toward the end of Avery’s life a quality of detachment and nostalgia overlaid his visual memories, as if he were looking back not at specific events, places, or people, but at life itself…’ Barbara Haskell (1982) pp. 164-169