MILTON AVERY’S GREAT INDEPENDENCE

FROM PLAINS OF TREES TO PLANES OF COLOR, THE AMERICAN ARTIST ESCHEWED A SINGLE ART MOVEMENT AND STYLE.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

This page: Milton Avery, Blossoming, 1918, oil on board, 11 x 15 in. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021. Opposite, from left: Milton Avery, Breaking Wave, 1959, oil on canvas, 32 x 42 in. Private collection. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Fishing Village, 1939, oil on canvas, 32 x 48 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

Milton Avery is an American original. A prolific painter, he spoke through his work. Milton Avery, which opened last month at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is the first time in nearly 40 years that audiences are able to enjoy a major survey of his work. The exhibition was conceived and organized by Edith Devaney. In her two decades at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the organizing venue for the exhibition, Devaney championed the work of American modernists. Through her curatorial efforts, she found that Avery served as the inspiration for many of these 20th-century masters. And therefore, “This is a much overdue exhibition,” she says.

For The Modern, this is a homecoming of sorts. “I’m personally thrilled to have this exhibition in Fort Worth,” enthuses director Dr. Marla Price. Not only did the last retrospective make a stop at the museum in the early 1980s, but Avery was the subject of Price’s doctoral dissertation. Devaney called upon her for guidance during the early planning stages of the retrospective. “To have her contribution is brilliant,” Devaney says. The exhibition includes about 70 paintings, ranging from Avery’s earliest work in the 1910s until his death in 1965. “For those who don’t know his work, it will be a great introduction,” offers Price.

Avery’s artistic journey followed a unique path. He was born into a working-class family in Connecticut in 1885. Lured by the promise of higher wages than what he earned at his factory job, he enrolled in a night class at the Connecticut League of Art Students to learn commercial lettering. He eventually enrolled in the school’s life drawing class on the recommendation of the League’s director, Charles Noel Flagg. By 1911, Avery listed his occupation as “artist.”

His earliest works, such as Blossoming (1918), depict the landscape around him. American Impressionist painters such as Childe Hassam, George Inness, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir offered early inspiration. Avery even followed their example of painting en plein air.

"This is a much overdue exhibition."

-Edith Devaney

Clockwise from top left: Milton Avery, Boathouse by the Sea, 1959, oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Milton Avery Trust courtesy Victoria Miro and Waqas Wajahat © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Coney Island, 1931, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Photograph by Adam Reich © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, March in Brown, 1954, oil on canvas, 44 x 32 in. Private collection. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021; Milton Avery, Excursion on the Thames, 1953, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.

Exhibition opportunities followed and in 1915 his work was included in the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts’ Fifth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Annex Gallery. It is fitting, then, that this museum is the other collaborating venue for the exhibition.

While his style continuously matured, throughout his life, landscape painting remained an important part of Avery’s oeuvre. Beginning with a summer spent at an art colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1920, his work became informed by the places he visited along the Eastern Seaboard. In 1925, he moved to New York City to be closer to Sally Michel, whom he met in Gloucester. They married the following year.

Just as Avery was a great observer of the natural world, he was equally curious about what was happening in the art world. In New York he took advantage of every opportunity to visit exhibitions, galleries, and museums to see new work by American and European artists. It was during this time that he was exposed to the work of Henri Matisse, to whom his style is often compared. Avery absorbed what he saw. Before long, his work entered into conversation with modernism. His landscapes began to flatten. His palette became increasingly muted, and the perspective began to shift.

By the 1930s, perhaps inspired by New York’s dense population, he started to put people in his work. He depicted urban life, as in The Auction (c. 1930s), in a manner that seems to cross Expressionism with the Ashcan School. “He embodies a sense of history with European modernism as well as his own particular development,” explains Devaney.

At the same time, portraiture became part of his practice. Family and friends, including his new acquaintances Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, became his sitters. And Avery’s influence can be seen in the early work of these artists, who would soon come to define Abstract Expressionism. According to Price, “Milton Avery is an artist that artists admire.” Devaney adds, “Avery sat between American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. He had a foot in both camps but was affiliated with neither.” Of these younger artists she says, “They were hugely inspired by Milton Avery, and they were happy to say it.”

In 1938, Avery traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in Eastern Canada. “Gaspé was one of the most important encounters of his career,” says Price, adding, “The total environment is always shaping him.” Here, the built environment and natural world started merging into unified wholes. And, as seen in Fishing Village (1939), Avery employed contrasting textures to define space. This trip yielded a significant body of work, and the experience influenced his work throughout the following prolific decade, during which time he achieved critical and commercial success. His palette also began to shift, and landscapes as well as portraits were increasingly reduced to planes of color. Two Figures at Desk (1944), for example, is lighter and seems to explore the entire tonal range of red. “The developments that he made towards attitudes of form and color in the ’40s were a seismic change. They have a new way of looking at the world,” explains Devaney. But his frenetic pace took its toll and in 1949, Avery suffered a heart attack.

In the ensuing years, Avery’s work took on a greater simplicity. As Price relates, “Sally Avery said that the health scare gave him a new focus and determination. When he goes to Provincetown [in 1957], we see an incredible blossoming of paintings that refocused him.” At that point, his work became monumental. Nature continued to provide a source of inspiration, as in Boathouse by the Sea (1959), just as it had in his earlier work. These pure abstractions, however, are reduced to harmoniously balanced form and color.

From the staccato energy of Avery’s earliest works to the calmness of the later works, this exhibition, Devaney anticipates, will inspire museumgoers. As she says, “I hope visitors see the joy of his work. I always say, ‘You always feel better when you see a Milton Avery.’” P

Top: Milton Avery, Hint of Autumn, 1954, oil on canvas, 53 x 34 in. Milton Avery Trust. Photograph by Adam Reich © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021. Bottom: Milton Avery, Studio View (Chop Suey), ca. 1930’s, watercolor on paper, 22.12 x 15.25 in., Private collection. Photograph by Adam Reich. © 2021 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021.