Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

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.

Together with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery was one of the mid-twentieth-century American artists whose work his fellow artists and contemporary critics held in the highest esteem.  At Avery's memorial service in 1965, Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, a long-term friend who had been in almost daily contact with Avery in the 1930s, extolled his "greatness" and referred to himself as a confirmed member of this painter's "idolatrous audience."¹ Three years later another close associate from the '30s, Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb concluded, "Avery is one of the few great painters of our time."²  Rothko, Gottlieb, and an additional future prominent member of the New York School, Barnett Newman, had begun visiting Avery regularly in the early '30s to discuss art and politics; and the four artists, together with their families, took a number of combined summer holidays in the 1930s and '40s. At various times in their careers, each of these painters also subscribed to Avery's lambent fields of color with areas of under painting showing through, thereby humanizing their predominately geometric painting styles, while creating, through this type of layering, evocative metaphors of the human mind's or spirit's elusive mysteries. 

In 1957, the year after Pollock's tragic death in a traffic accident, the preeminent New York critic Clement Greenberg moved away from Pollock's art to devote one of his most concerted essays in his entire career to the subject of Milton Avery's art, an article remarkably prescient in its emphasis on Avery's work as the single most important harbinger of the next new wave represented by the stain painting of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.  Greenberg pointed out:

That the[se] younger "anti-Cubist" abstract painters who admire Avery do not share his naturalism has not prevented them from learning from him any more than it has prevented them from admiring him.  His art demonstrates how sheer truth of feeling can galvanize what seem the most inertly decorative elements . . . into tight and dramatic unities. . . .³

It may seem an extraordinary contradiction to regard Avery's lightly whimsical and definitely lyrical domestic views of friends, family, and vacations as first the inspiration for the color-field Abstract Expressionists, who notably embraced the sublime and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in the 1940s, and then a precursor for the mostly nonobjective stain painting Greenberg called "post-painterly abstraction" in the 1950s, but such was the case.  An integral aspect of Avery's painting was his enormous pride in his daughter March; her growing interest in art, literature, music, and life was memorialized as a subject so many times in his work it can be considered a special genre.  In 1947, at a time when the Abstract Expressionists were beginning to paint large in order to be more intimate, as Rothko famously observed, the prestigious New York branch of Durand-Ruel Gallery hosted Avery's first retrospective, a deeply personal exhibition entitled "My Daughter March." Featuring works from the early 1930s to 1947, this exhibition was predicated on the many coincidences between Avery's own artistic development and his daughter's growth from infancy to adolescence. In this exhibition Avery included a revealing self-portrait in which he surrounds himself with several of his paintings of his daughter, including, most prominently, March Playing the Cello, completed four years earlier.  

Since the nineteenth century, music had been idealized as a preeminent art form when the German philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche pointed to it as the most distilled and abstract type of art and, together with poetry, the model most worthy for all the others to emulate.  The portrait of March performing on her cello can be considered Avery's contribution to this long-idealized tradition, and it serves, moreover, as part of an overarching musical analogy reinforcing his depiction of himself in his self-portrait in blue as a metaphor re-affirming the truth of his favorite poem, Wallace Steven's "The Man with a Blue Guitar," which he often read aloud to his family.  The poem describes how even representational images come to be inflected with artists' distinctly stylistic views of the world, and it crystallizes this truth in its thoughtful apothegm, "Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar."⁴ Given Avery's enormous admiration for this poem, we can regard his 1947 portrait of himself as well as its references to his earlier paintings of March as his actual and metonymical surrogates, in addition to being representations of his carefully articulated painterly fictions reflecting his own stylistically charted universe.         

Without doubt, Avery regarded the painting of March playing the cello as one of his most important images of her since it figures so prominently in his self-portrait.  Remarkable for its size, the painting is also a notable example of Avery's practice of dividing painting and drawing into the different metaphysical realities of abstraction and representation.  The scrubbed in background hues of taupe and coral in this work form a painterly and assuredly two-dimensional backdrop, with the notable suggestion of a horizon line enabling viewers to read it as a quasi-three dimensional space, which alternately opens and closes, becoming first two- and then three-dimensional, depending on one's view of it, thus setting up the basic contrapuntal theme of reading it in terms of the visual counterpoint of abstraction and figuration.  In combination with this insistently painterly background, the figure of March is both drawn and painted in oils.  In addition to painting broad areas of color, Avery liberally employs the blunt wooden end of his brush to achieve a distinct drawing style, employed in this painting for the delineation of March's features, the scoring of the checkerboard pattern on her blouse or sweater, and the emphasis on certain details on her cello. Avery enlists a subtle celadon to serve double duty as an abstracted complement to the background and a notably coloristic hue for characterizing March's face, hands, and legs.  In this painting pink functions as an important color in its own right as well as a means for describing March's blouse and socks. The painting exemplifies the stylistic quality the artist's wife, Sally Michel Avery, often characterized as a situation in which "every color loves every other color in Milton's art." The consequent related hues of taupe, coral, and pink in this painting are achieved with great precision through closely aligned values, so each color appears to be accepting the others around it, creating a full complement of attuned forces far different from the competing ones found in the Fauvist art to which his paintings were often compared in the early 1940s.  This playful seesawing of color, viewed alternatively as literally self-reflexive and figurative, can be understood as visually equivalent to the implicit harmonies suggested by the act of March tugging at her sawing bow, a tool both drawn and painted to suggest movement and perhaps a pun on the past tense of the verb "to see" as well as an occasion of Avery's renowned perceptual wit.  As she plays the cello before her, March listens intently to the music she is making, apparently unaware of the compatible visual counterpoint her father has so adroitly orchestrated in conceiving this painting of her.

¹ Mark Rothko, "Commemorative Essay," in Barbara Haskell, Milton Avery, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, September 16-December 5, 1982, p. 181.

² Adolph Gottlieb, A Small Retrospective Survey of Paintings and Drawings by Milton Avery, San Francisco, California, September 1968, n.p.

³ Clement Greenberg, "Milton Avery," Arts 32, December 1957: 40-45; rev. ed., in Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston, 1961, rpt. Robert Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings, New York, 2002, p. 85.

⁴ Wallace Stevens, "The Man with a Blue Guitar," in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, New York, 1972, p. 133.  Stevens was one of Avery's favorite poets.  In addition, to being attracted to his verse and his ideas about art, Avery no doubt responded to Stevens as a fellow Hartfordite.