Forging a Path

Paintings from Milton Avery’s early years in Connecticut are spotlighted in an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Through October 17

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Milton Avery was born in upstate New York in 1885. His family moved to Connecticut in 1898. He took art classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford from 1905 to 1918 and then at the Art Society in Hartford. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford is showing Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years through October 17. The exhibition includes works on loan from the Milton Avery Trust as well as works by his Hartford teachers and colleagues. Milton Avery (1885-1965), Hartford Woods, 1919. Oil on board, 16 x 20 in. The Milton Avery Trust. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“This exhibition explores Avery’s formative years, before he was celebrated as a purveyor of modernism,” says Erin Monroe, Robert H. Schutz Jr. Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. “It was here in Hartford where Avery took his first art classes, and at the Wadsworth, where he first exhibited publicly.” He first showed at the Atheneum in 1915 at the museum’s Fifth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture.Milton Avery (1885-1965), Two Cows, 1932. Gouache on colored paper, 12 x 17 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In 1929, Duncan Phillips purchased a painting for the Phillips Collection, the first museum to acquire one of his works. In 1943, the Phillips mounted his first solo museum show, and he was included in the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art the same year.

Known for his distinctive style and use of color, Avery’s artistic roots are explored in this exhibition. Hartford Woods, 1919, illustrates the influence of American impressionism on the young artist, who passed in 1965, and demonstrates his use of thick impasto. Milton Avery (1885-1965), Rainbow Rocks, 1921. Oil and wax on board. 16 x 20 in. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In 1926, he married Sally Michel (1902-2003) who would work as a commercial illustrator to support her husband’s career. The couple honeymooned in Connecticut and later moved to New York where they were in a circle that includes Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Marsden Hartley and Barnett Newman. Rothko wrote of Avery: “What was Avery’s repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”Milton Avery (1885-1965), Untitled (Collinsville Landscape), ca. 1930. Watercolor on paper, 15 x 22 in. Private Collection. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Two Cows, 1932, shows the advent of his distinctive style of flattened space, large fields of unusual color and a thinner application of paint. His simplified style reminded people of Asian art. Someone once asked him if the space in his paintings was reminiscent of Eastern art. Known for his sense of humor, he replied, “Yes, I used to paint in East Hartford.”—