Milton Avery has been widely recognized as one of the most famous modernist painters born in the U.S. There is little point in recapping his extraordinary career and achievements here. But, for anyone unfamiliar with his life and work, here are two good starting points:
- A beginner’s guide to Milton Avery (Royal Academy of Arts)
- Milton Avery Then and Now (New Criterion)
By way of establishing a basic time line, Milton Clark Avery was born in Altmar, New York, on 7 March 1885. Avery moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1905, where he studied briefly at the Connecticut League of Art Students, and then moved to New York in 1925, where the following year he married fellow artist Sally Michel (1902-2003). The couple shared joint studio space and worked together. Michel subsequently focused more on promoting her husband’s career than her own. Her decision to undertake commercial illustrations to keep the family afloat allowed her husband to devote himself to his art.
Avery, largely self taught, is best known for developing a simplified style of painting featuring broad, contoured shapes with veiled fields of color. Avery was close friends with, and influenced, many younger artists, including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler, all now recognized as major Abstract Expressionists.
Milton Avery. 1945. Seaside.
Avery had his first solo museum exhibition, at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington D.C., in 1944. Shortly afterwards, Paul Rosenberg, who had fled France to establish a gallery in New York, agreed to buy twenty-five of Avery’s paintings twice a year. This might have been a daunting commitment for some artists. But Avery was never short of ideas, all competing to be the first to reach canvas, and he completed almost all his paintings the same day he started them.
This success enabled Avery to travel. In 1946, perhaps inspired by the magnificent 1940 exhibition of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Avery, with his wife and daughter, spent three months in Mexico.
Milton Avery. 1946. Crucifixion.
Among the major paintings inspired by this visit was “Crucifixion.” When it came up for auction in 2011, Sotheby’s estimate was between 1.0 and 1.5 million dollars. The painting is based on a woman praying in front of a crucifix at the Parroquia, the main church in San Miguel de Allende.
Though the family spent most of their time in San Miguel, they also took brief trips elsewhere, to places such as Mexico City. Avery did numerous watercolors in Mexico, and also made “made many quick sketches in small notebooks, observing specific colors and atmospheric conditions,” which he would refer back to when painting oils once he was back in New York.
One of these side trips was to Chapala, as recalled, shortly after his passing, by his wife when she was interviewed by Dorothy Seckler:
Milton was very impressed with the beauty of Mexico because it is such a dramatic and beautiful country. And we went down there with no particular itinerary. But on the way down, we met a couple and they were going to San Miguel de Allende. So they said, “Why don’t you come along, it’s this lovely little colonial town.”
So we went intending to stay overnight and we stayed six weeks. And so we met a lot of people there and made a lot of new friends and went sketching every day. Milton did a whole series of watercolors while he was down in Mexico.
He said, though, that Mexico was so picturesque in itself that it was very difficult to make a painting. It was so pictorial.
. . . But even so. When we got back to New York he did a series of paintings from these watercolors, some of which I think were very stunning.. . . and we left San Miguel and went down to Guadalajara [Chapala] which was on this great lake where they find a lot of the pre-Columbian idols because people used to throw the idols into the lake there to appease the gods. And actually, one of the nicest paintings—one of Milton’s minor masterpieces I think—was “Mexican Seaside” which was just shown in London and that was done from a sketch he made by Lake Chapala.
. . . [in] the review in the London Times, the critic said that this was undoubtedly a masterpiece. And the interesting thing was it was done in ’46, but it’s very much like the late things he did in Provincetown in 1960. Amazing. I mean it was like, in terms of colors and shapes it was like a forerunner. It had that same type of quality.”
- Can you help? Do you have an image of “Mexican Seaside,” or know its current location?
Three years after visiting Mexico, Avery had a heart attack, from which he never fully recovered, though he continued to paint, and was able to visit Europe for the first time. He had a second heart attack ten years later and died in New York on 3 January 1965.
- Avery’s daughter—March Avery Cavanaugh—is also a professional artist.
Sources
- El Informador: 14 Nov 2011: “Salen a subasta obras de Edward Hopper y Milton Avery realizadas en Mexico.”
- Dorothy Seckler. 1967. Oral history interview with Sally Michel Avery, 1967 Nov. 3, for the Archives of American Art.
Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).