Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

The artist
Milton Avery Trust, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Houston, Texas, University of Houston, Sarah Campbell Blaffler Gallery; Mexico City, Mexico, Museo de Arte Moderno de Mexico; Monterrey, Mexico, Museo de Monterrey; Caracas, Venezuela, El Museo de Bellas Artes; Newport Beach, California, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Milton Avery: Avery in Mexico and After, August 1981-July 1982, illustrated in color p. 51
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Fort Worth Art Museum; Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Denver, Colorado, The Denver Art Museum; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Walker Art Center, Milton Avery, September 1982-October 1983, no. 49, illustrated in color p. 70
Memphis, Tennessee, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens; Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Gerald Peters Gallery; St. Petersburg, Florida, Museum of Fine Arts of St. Petersburg; Montgomery, Alabama, Blount, Inc.; Salt Lake City, Utah, Salt Lake Art Center; Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hunter Museum of Art; Tucson, Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Milton Avery's Mexico, April 1984-June 1985, no. 7, illustrated in color p. 22

Robert Hobbs, Milton Avery, New York, 1990, pp. 146-7, illustrated in color p. 147.

We are grateful to Robert Hobbs for preparing the following essay. Dr. Hobbs is the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and a visiting professor at Yale University. He is the author of Milton Avery, New York, 1990.

Milton Avery is one of those immensely rare and fortunate artists to have inspired both a serious and popular following, making him a painter's painter as well as an American icon. Beginning in the 1930s, he became close friends with three young artists who would become major Abstract Expressionists in the '40s; they are Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.  Not only would the foursome meet several times a week to discuss art and politics, but they also sometimes vacationed together with their families.  The great esteem these younger painters accorded Avery continued throughout their lives, as testified by their emulation of his special handling of color, albeit for different purposes, and their public and private verbal testaments.  In their often-cited co-authored letter to the New York Times in 1943, a statement correctly regarded as a manifesto of their early Abstract Expressionist style, Gottlieb and Rothko at one point describe their art in terms apposite of Avery's own distinctive style of painting:

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.  We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal.  We wish to reassert the picture plane.  We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.[i]

According to critic Dore Ashton, Rothko often "extol[led]" Avery's greatness as a painter. "What Rothko said about Avery," she emphasizes, "was that he was first and foremost a great poet. . .  [creating] a poetry of sheer loveliness."[ii] For all three of these artists, Avery's semi-transparent lambent fields of color, conceived in rich hues and muted tones, keyed to a close range of values to achieve a parity between a painting's individual parts so that "every color loves every other color,"[iii] worked well with their desire, beginning in the 1940s, to view the unconscious as a domain of evocative signs and mythic power. In addition to serving as a model for these artists, Avery's work over the years has appealed to great numbers of people, so many in fact that block-long queues often formed outside the Whitney Museum during this artist's first retrospective in 1982. 

Crucifixion, made after a three-month-long trip to Mexico in 1946, exemplifies Avery's ability to create works appealing to serious and popular audiences while responding to a contemporary cultural dialogue between United States and Mexico around the time of World War II. In 1940 New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a show billed as "the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Mexican art ever assembled in this or any other country"[iv] and certainly the largest show initiated by this institution.  By bringing cutting-edge Mexican contemporary art together with its many antecedents, this exhibition demonstrated how contemporary artists were able to draw on their country's own traditions to achieve a distinct style rather than simply following European leads, and it implied how artists in the United States might take a similar tact with their own native traditions. This strategy responded to the approach some U.S. artists had already taken, and it no doubt encouraged a number of others to veer away from the academic, European geometric abstraction of many American abstract artists and forge new directions.  A number of artists subscribed to this search for indigenous traditions, including Gottlieb, who drew inspiration from ancient Native-American pictographs and petroglyphs; Newman, who looked to the Kwakiutl; Robert Motherwell, who visited Mexico and found sources complementary to the Spanish colonial tradition of his native California; and Jackson Pollock, who was inspired by Navajo sand painting. When he went to Mexico six years after MoMA's landmark exhibition and used the country's local color and folk art as a basis for a series of works, Avery may have been responding to this institution's challenge by demonstrating he could handle Mexican subjects and intense local colors without compromising the urbane modernist style for which he was becoming known.

Fully participating in this trend of looking both at the United States' own cultural traditions—American nineteenth-century plain painting being one important source for him—as well as remaining open to Pan-American conversations, Milton Avery vacationed with his wife and daughter mainly in San Miguel Allende followed by brief tours to a number of sites, including Mexico City.  During his time in Mexico, Avery made many quick sketches in small notebooks, observing specific colors and atmospheric conditions; then, while still in this country, he used some of these drawings as the basis for several watercolors; only later, after returning to New York City, did he undertake oils of particular scenes.

A major painting inspired by Avery's trip is Crucifixion; it is a rethinking and consolidation of a watercolor made in Mexico as well as a work evidencing the same type of whimsical abstractions, abbreviated notations, and sensuous delight in saturated matte hues as the painted masks and folk-art he no doubt saw in open air markets, festivals, and Patzcuaro's folk art museum, where native crafts and traditional costumes were exhibited.  The source for this painting is San Miguel de Allende's Parrochia church (1689-1730), located on the south side of the city's Jardin Principal.  The worshipper is a local woman.[v]

In Crucifixion, Avery's inimitable dry wit and charm—crucial aspects of his style—enable him to initiate a contrapuntal movement between people and objects, hinged on a delicate fulcrum between representation and abstraction.  In this work, imbricated forms, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, are abbreviated signs of their real-life equivalents at the same time they also resemble their folk-art counterparts—each set appearing to morph into the other to create an ongoing and delightful game of presentation and re-presentation.  We know this substitutive process between levels of representation was the artist's intention when we look at the title of another painting made after returning from Mexico, China Christ, compressing together levels of "reality," so that a folk-art ceramic figure of Christ is as "real" as the modern abstract style of interlocking forms comprising it. With its yellow Christ, referencing perhaps Gauguin's famous Brittany-period The Yellow Christ of 1889 or the crucified Jesus made of cornstalks and leather in Parrochia, Avery's Crucifixion also set up a similar oscillating situation, distinctly quizzical and ultimately very urbane in its subtle humor.  This strategy is particularly successful in this painting where it is reinforced by Avery's saturated hues, contrasting one with another, while also reinforcing, through closely aligned values, each with the other—black being the major exception to this closely articulated synthesis of point and counterpoint that Avery plays so well.

In Crucifixion Avery creates a brilliant riposte, making the abstruse formalism of modern art charming.  If modern paintings are first and foremost experiences of the medium before being representations of reality, Avery gives people images of a mediated reality—pictures of pictures—so to speak, demonstrating how aspects of reality have already been turned into such other genres as folk-art crucifixes, only to be transposed by Avery to still another medium, paint.  Because Crucifixion appears so direct and innocent and Avery's view of folk art an idealized image of a simpler and more natural world, his subtle wit and complex understanding of nature and culture are frequently overlooked.  And yet, his idea is similar to Saul Steinberg's later concept of a culturally mediated world in which people speak in different typefaces and scripts that accord with their distinct perspectives, particularly their status and pretentions.  Unlike Steinberg's humorous and sharp observations, Avery's are more low-key and indirect, so the "joke" resounds throughout his work, affecting not only the subject but also the formal elements comprising it.

[i] Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, "Letter to Edwin A. Jewell," New York Times, 13 June 1943.  Barnett Newman worked on this letter with Gottlieb and Rothko, but did not sign it, since he had not shown in the exhibition Jewell had reviewed.
[ii] Dore Ashton, "Milton Avery" in Milton Avery: Avery in Mexico and After (Mexico City: Museum of Modern Art of Mexico and National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, 1981) p. 14.
[iii] Robert Hobbs, Milton Avery (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990), p. 122.  This is a particularly pertinent observation about Avery's use of color made by his wife, the artist Sally Michel.
[iv] Museum of Modern Art Press Release, Wednesday, May 15, 1940.
[v] March Avery Cavanaugh, email to Robert Hobbs, 26 October 2011.