Artworks

The Averys were immersed in the art and culture of New York City and, by the 1960s, Woodstock, New York, and counted many writers and poets as friends. In interviews, Sally mentions Avery’s love of poetry, and that he used to like to read aloud to her and March. She mentions the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, and also Swann’s Way and Don Quixote. Some of the notable artists, composers, writers and poets that were with the Averys, both at the MacDowell Colony (1953, 1954, 1956) and at Yaddo (1955) include: James Baldwin, Howard Moss, Peter Viereck, Sara Henderson Hay, Hortense Calisher, Alston Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Mona Van Duyn, Dawn Powell, Marcel Duchamp, Elizabeth Shepley Sargeant, May Swenson, Gardner Read, Alec Waugh, Irene Rice Pereira, Virginia Sorenson, Anthony Hecht, Vladimir Ussachevsky and his wife, Elizabeth Denison Kray. Poets and poetry reading feature in several important paintings, including Poetry Reading, 1957, and Poetry After Breakfast, 1951. While the two figures in this painting have not been identified, events such as the one depicted here were a common occurrence in the Averys’ home. As early as the 1930s, the couple’s apartment became a meeting place for young artists, writers, musicians and poets. In around 1938, the couple even began organising sketching classes where they and their friends shared the costs of a model. Rothko, Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, in particular, were regular visitors, and they would discuss painting and look at Avery’s latest work. While Avery was never the most enthusiastic conversationalist – his famous dictum being ‘why talk when you can paint?’ – he would always sketch the assembled throng. Sally Michel Avery, in the foreword to the catalogue for the 1986 exhibition Painting People, sets the bohemian scene: ‘In our home on Columbus Avenue and later on West Eleventh Street someone was always dropping in – a continual array of artists, relatives, models and friends of friends. Everyone was welcome. There were no formal invitations, no formal dinner parties. If you happened to be present when dinner was being readied you were automatically included… Always the talk was of painting – who was exhibiting, who was slipping, who was worth discussing. Everyone joined in except Milton, who sat quietly sketching first one and then another of the assembled group. No one noticed or commented. Occasionally Milton would drop a pointed remark – a sign that he was aware of all that was happening. This random cast provided Milton with much of his subject matter. It was from these casual notes made of many evenings that Milton later produced canvases memorable for their poetry and pithy insight on subjects as diverse as the aging Marsden Hartley and the young Mark Rothko.’ Two Poets is one of the last large-scale paintings completed by the artist and its masterful simplicity is, by turns, both modest and monumental. Barbara Haskell notes that: ‘During the winter of 1962–1963, Avery managed to execute a few paintings on canvas – interior figures which he treated as large, angular shapes. No longer physically able to blend multiple layers of color into uniform fields, Avery allowed thinly applied single hues to delineate forms. The result – as in Two Poets… – was a much more transparent, brushier effect than in previous work.’