Published 12/09/2001

Milton Avery Late Works — Landscapes and Seascapes, 1951–1963

Milton Avery late work landscapes and seascapes 1951-1963

Avery never achieved the critical acclaim that he deserved in his lifetime, and yet his pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism is unquestioned. Avery is very much a painter’s painter, and exerted great influence on the generation of painters that included Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who were 20 years his junior. Rothko was a friend of Avery and sought guidance from him.

Milton Avery. Dark Mountain 1958, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 ins / 152.4 x 183 cms. Courtesy Waddington Galleries

In Hilton Kramer’s view, Avery was the more important painter of the two, especially his late paintings, ‘for they encompass a far greater range of experience and bring to it a subtler and more varied pictorial vocabulary’.1 Waddington Galleries showed those late paintings, particularly the landscapes and seascapes which Kramer believes, ‘are among the greatest paintings ever produced by an American artist’.2 Rothko himself stated:

From the beginning there was nothing tentative about Avery. He always had that naturalness, that exactness and that inevitable completeness which can be achieved only by those gifted with magical means, by those born to sing.
There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them, but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the last touch of the brush. For Avery was a poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before. From these we have learned much and will learn more for a long time to come.3

All authors on Avery have admitted that he is a difficult artist to place in art historical terms.

Early in his career he was too modern for the traditionalists and not quite modern or radical enough for the avant-gardists. He was too ‘abstract’ for the realists and too realistic for the abstractionists. To this rule there were some notable exceptions, of course – among the abstractionists, Rothko was one of the first to speak of Avery’s ‘greatness’. By and large, however, Avery was too independent in his art to be enlisted in anyone’s cause but his own.4

Milton Avery was born in 1885, the youngest of four children, in a small town in New York State, inland from Lake Ontario. In 1898 his family moved to Connecticut where his father worked as a tanner. Milton Avery’s first job was in the Hartford Machine and Screw Company – he was an aligner and an assembler there for two years. Next he worked in the Underwood Manufacturing Company for six years, during which time his father died (1905). He began a commercial art class at the Connecticut League of Art Students, Hartford, and then transferred to life-drawing classes, which he attended for several years. His brother died in 1913. In February 1915 he had his first exhibition; in the same year his brother-in-law died. He continued to work as a mechanic, assembler, latheman and clerk in order to support his widowed mother, and his sister and his sister’s four children. In Barbara Haskell’s catalogue for the exhibition she organised the ‘Milton Avery Retrospective’ for the Whitney Museum. In 1982 she considered the effect of loss on the young artist:

The death of his father, two brothers, and brother-in-law, all before his thirtieth birthday, engendered in Avery a profound sense of the transitory nature of life. He responded to this sense of temporality with an unrelenting compulsion to work, as if work itself would provide a deliverance from the terrors of everyday life, a feeling which corresponded to the Puritan notion that work accounted for life’s essential meaning. Painting was Avery’s work; he approached it with utter dedication, eliminating all unrelated activities and interests. Routine and discipline became his means of combating uncertainty. His sense of discipline pushed him to rise at the same early hour each morning and paint and sketch most of the day. Because Avery viewed painting as a duty, his approach was that of an artisan and his attitude without pretension or agony. He likened himself to a shoemaker – working every day, regardless of mood or inspiration.5

In 1924 Avery met Sally Michel who he married in 1926; in that same year his mother died. In 1925, Avery moved to New York. Until then Avery painted landscapes in the tonal manner of 19th century Impressionists and Tonalists. He concentrated on evoking a particular mood; his early paintings have a spontaneous refinement. Since financial necessity meant that Avery had worked from the age of 16 to support an extended family, he found New York in the 1920s liberating. He enjoyed experimenting with new ideas, and there he had the opportunity at the Museum of Modern Art to study European modernism. Later, he combined the energy and joy with the naïve charm of folk art, and the candour of children’s art. He also began to paint in thin washes, abandoning the impastoed, palette-knife technique ‘in favour of broadly painted areas of color applied with a brush. In doing so, he liberated the effects of color from surface structure. This focus on color per se became Avery’s lifelong preoccupation … The development of color harmonies came to dominate Avery’s art’.6 At this stage Avery’s ‘favourite’ artists included Braque, Franz Marc, Dufy, Matisse and Edouard Vuillard. Referring to a painting ‘Sunday Riders’ (1929) Avery’s comments explain his artistic practice at the time – the removal of superfluous detail in his compositions.

If I have left out the bridles or any other detail that is supposed to go with horses, trees or the human figure, the only reason for the omissions is that not only are these details unnecessary to the design but their insertion would disorganize space in the canvas already filled by some color or line.7

In the same article he articulated his views on modern art, ‘The canvas must be completely organized through the perfect arrangement of form, line, color and space. Objects in the subject matter, therefore, cannot be painted representatively, but they must take their place in the whole design’.8 Avery’s art in the early part of his career was firmly anchored in the notion of the aesthetic idea being of paramount value; his feelings about the world would be translated into a purely pictorial language. Consistent with such ideas (also expressed by other modernists including Matisse). Milton Avery painted not directly from nature now, but from sketches and watercolours which were translated into formalist works in the studio.

Given Avery’s working class background and the pressure, during the Depression, to express political messages through realist means, Avery was single-minded and committed to a personal modernist vision. At the same time he did not ever pursue purely formalist exercises such as geometric abstraction; his work retained a personal touch and a link with nature. He was never an intellectual and preferred detective stories to art theory Hobbs believes that:

Avery naturalised modernism by accepting it as inevitable and logical. Thus he humanized it by leaving out the rhetoric, retaining mainly its charm, while perpetuating its truly innovative way of looking at the world as an abstraction populated by people who are caricatures of their former selves. Rather than seeing this change as tragic, however, Avery accepted it as normal. His acceptance of the state of abstraction and alienation that is the modern world is one of his great contributions.
… Although he was forced on a few occasions to refer to his philosophy, his generative ideas, and his attitude toward European modernists, he remains for the most part as silent for us as the eighteenth and nineteenth century untutored artists whose work appears to have encouraged him to find a way to show how American art could be familiar and new at the same time.9

During the 1930s and 1940s the Averys spent their summers mostly in Gloucester and Vermont. After the Second World War he travelled more extensively to Mexico (1946), Canada (1947) and also to Maine (1948). In 1949 he suffered his first major heart attack. Poor health affected him and limited his level of activity until his death in 1965. In 1952 he travelled to Europe for the first time; to London and Paris. Haskell writes:

The experience of his heart attack had convinced him how relatively insignificant were the specific details that distinguish one object from another, and how important were interconnections and universalities. As a result, his pictorial focus shifted from the description of individual parts within a composition to the harmony of a whole. Overall tonal harmonies replaced the contrasting color areas typical of his work of the preceding decades.10

The recent exhibition at Waddington Galleries in London focuses on the Late Work, that is the Landscapes and Seascapes, 1951–1963. In these beautiful, understated compositions Avery minimalises shapes and graphic details. He sought a universality either in the essence of an individual or place or in the relationship between individuals or objects. In the light of the angst that has dominated much of the critical dialogue in the past 50 years, Avery’s art may appear unintelligible. His work reveals a low-key mood; a subtle harmony where nature is not threatening.

Clement Greenberg publicly acknowledged Avery’s importance in 1957, in an article for Arts in which he called for a full-scale retrospective of his work, ‘not for the sake of his reputation but for the situation of art in New York. The latest generation of abstract painters in New York has certain salutatory lessons to learn from him that they cannot learn from any other artist on the scene’.11 The effect of Greenberg’s article was significant in terms of critical acceptance and also, more importantly, in terms of Avery’s confidence. The late paintings shown in London are among his finest, they are compellingly fresh, exquisite colour harmonies. The work ‘acts as a subtle reminder that the real world has its own magic and sense of wonder if one approaches it directly, sensitively, and as unselfconsciously as a child’.12

Footnotes:

Kramer, H. ‘Introduction’. In: Hobbs, R (ed). Milton Avery. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990: 24.

Ibid, p 24

Rothko, M. ‘Memorial address for Milton Avery’ 7 January 1965. Quoted by Leslie Waddington in Milton Avery Late Works — Landscapes and Seascapes, 1951—1963. Waddington Galleries, 12 September—6 October 2001.

Kramer, op. Cit; p24.

Haskell, B. Milton Avery Retrospective. Whitney Museum of Art, 1982: 17.

Ibid, p 24.

Avery, M. Hartford Courant, 3 January 1931, quoted by Hobbs, op.cit, p 51.

Ibid, p 54.

Hobbs, ibid, p 66 and p 93.

Haskell, op. cit p 117.

Greenberg, C. ‘Milton Avery’. Arts 1957; 32: 40—45.

Hobbs, op. cit, p 214.

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