Milton Avery, Knoedler & Company, New York - Onrushing Waves

Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves
Knoedler & Company, New York
November 4, 2004 – January 29, 2005

Knoedler & Company presents Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves. This focused exhibition on Milton Avery and his relationship to the sea includes paintings, both on canvas and paper, spanning the 1920s through the 1950s. Also included are a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks recording trips to California, Massachusetts, Maine and the South of France.

Milton Avery (1885–1965) continuously drew whatever was around him, and developed a working method of turning his sketches into watercolors, and watercolors into canvases. His summer visits to the sea began in the 1920, at the popular artist’s colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The earliest work in this exhibition, a watercolor, Rocky Coast, dates from one of those early trips. Milton Avery and his family went to the sea nearly every summer after that, and he constantly drew images of moving water, land, and sky. Milton Avery’s wife, the painter Sally Michel, recalled:

We were followers of the sea. On the beaches of Provincetown, Gloucester and the Gaspé we braved the surf and rocky shore, spending endless hours contemplating the sea … We spent a summer by the Pacific enthralled by the wild surf and the strange rock formations … But it was the sea, alternately black and mysterious or ruddy and gay that expressed the mystery and independence that makes its lure unfathomable. For Milton this was a subject to challenge again and again.

While Milton Avery’s depictions of the sea have been the subject of previous exhibitions, this is the first to focus on his treatment of the sea’s movement and energy in all its permutations.

Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Arthur C. Danto. 

KNOEDLER & COMPANY
19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.knoedlergallery.com