A burst of color and light
Milton Avery comes home in sweeping exhibit at Wadsworth Atheneum
Milton Avery, the famed mid-20th century painter whose first gallery exhibit was a group show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1915, is on that museum’s walls again over a century later. This time it’s for a career retrospective featuring more than 70 of his singularly bright, colorful, semi-abstract works. It’s the largest exhibit of Avery’s work in the U.S. in decades.
“Milton Avery” is at the Wadsworth through June 5, after having already been seen at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Indiana. It moves to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in July.
The Wadsworth has been a constant in the appreciation and reconsideration of Avery’s work, from the beginning of his career until now, 57 years after his death in 1965. It was at the Wadsworth in 1915 that Avery had the first public exhibition of his paintings. The Atheneum was also part of the first large retrospective of Avery’s work in 1952, an exhibit that also traveled to Boston and Washington, D.C. One of his best-known paintings, “Husband and Wife,” which adorns posters, banners and advertisements for this exhibition, resides in the Wadsworth’s permanent collection.
Avery was able to distill complex natural scenes to their essence, both in shapes and colors. The exhibition picks up on the accessible, reality-based nature of Avery’s paintings by pointing out where in Connecticut or New England some of his earliest inspirations were found.
Though the hardcover catalogue for the exhibition, published by the Royal Academy of Arts, makes a valiant attempt, Avery’s paintings do not translate well to the printed page. The textures, colors and scale of his work need to be appreciated in person.
The Atheneum offers room for the
70 or so works in the show to breathe, placing them through several adjoining gallery spaces. It has also added short videos about the artist, including his time in Connecticut, that are unique to the exhibit’s Hartford stop. The museum has expanded upon some of the explanatory notes next to the paintings, adding photographs of areas in Connecticut and Vermont that have been identified as the
subjects of a few of Avery’s landscapes.
The Wadsworth is also offering family-friendly activities like a felt board where visitors can experiment with colorful shapes and spaces, and a “Month with Milton Challenge” in which participants are given free sketchbooks and encouraged to draw every day for a month. A number of children were seen admiring Avery’s painting on the exhibit’s opening weekend, drawn to the large canvases, grand bursts of color and fun items like cows and an alligator figurine in some of the paintings.
Avery was born in New York state but moved to East Hartford with his family in 1898 when he was 13. In 1905, while working in local factories during the day, he began taking night classes
The first room of paintings in the exhibit covers his early years, when he enjoyed doing landscapes, including the 1930 “Rolling Hills,” which program notes say “may have been inspired by a summer stay in Collinsville.”
Erin Monroe — the Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth, who helped shape how the exhibit would be presented in Hartford — explains that Avery “starts his career with super-impressionistic
en plein air painting, the style that was popular at the time. In the 1930s, there’s a jump to imaginative color,” she says, which ultimately led to abstracted outdoor visions such as 1945 s “Blue Trees.”
The second room is titled “The Urban Scene” and documents Avery’s move to New York City and his marriage to Sally Michel (also an artist) in the mid-1920s. He started painting cityscapes
rather than landscapes and also found inspiration in vaudeville theaters and Coney Island. Milton and Sally “would have gatherings at their apartment with their artist friends from Hartford,” Monroe says.
The next room, “Still Lifes,” has a more domestic theme, with several paintings of objects in the Averys’ apartment, as well as a “cubist vibe,” Monroe notes, as he develops his one-dimensional, color-filled style. She points out a still life of a mandolin where Avery has drawn in the fretboard and strings on the instruments by scratching lines directly into the paint. Mostly, she says, Avery painted “things around their apartment,” like a fascinating study of a blue bowl with nuts in it, reduced to basic shapes.
“Red Anemones,” from 1942, depicts a flower vase standing next to small figurines of an alligator and a goat. Besides the objects in the apartment, Avery also painted the people in it: himself, standing in a bathroom, Sally (in “The Artist and His Wife”) and their daughter March — who became an artist herself, is now 89 years old, and sat for a useful interview in the exhibit catalogue.
The final exhibition area is “Breakthrough” and contains the well-known “Husband and Wife,” “Beach Blankets,” “Grazing Brahmins,” “The Seine,” “Excursion on the Thames,” “Speedboat’s Wake” and other works that define what Monroe describes as “that limit of abstraction where we’ve been heading.”
Avery didn’t like to talk about his work much, including his influences. But he hung out with other artists who were experimenting with color and large shapes. Avery’s work stood out from that of his friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb because while there were abstract elements in his work, he also drew people and objects around him. While he favored a purposefully flat, one-dimensional style using large shapes and bright clean colors, his paintings have recognizable locations like apartments, farms and forests. Even the paintings with the largest blocks of color and few identifying details are distinguishable as beaches and forests.
An extraordinarily disciplined artist, Avery painted every day. To assemble the retrospective, the curators (led by Edith Devaney of the Royal Academy of Arts) had literally thousands of works to choose from. What they’ve constructed is not just a sweeping overview of the painter’s work, but also of his life: the painting show his many trips with Sally and March, his reactions to city and country life and how he lived at home.
It’s a life and career that began in the Hartford area, and now we have a chance to see how it changed, blossomed and came home.
The Milton Avery retrospective is at the Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main St., Hartford, through June 5. Museum admission is $15, $12 senior, $5 students and free for children 17 and under and all Hartford residents. thewadsworth. org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.