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ON OUR COVER
Avery painted scenes of nature throughout his career, but he preferred simple forms
to realistic details, and his palette is distinctively personal. The results come close to
abstraction. In Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (based on Avery’s memories of Provincetown,
Massachusetts), the sky is a straight and narrow blue band at the painting’s
upper rim. The rest of the canvas is divided into two trapezoids of almost equal size
and shape. The lower of these, the sea grass, is pale and lightly streaked, and echoes
the tonality of the sky; above it is a wedge of a predominantly darker, saturated blue,
with patches both of a lighter blue and, more sharply, of deep black. Magically, the
overall effect is of waves flecked with white foam.
That black is paradoxical: as Matisse remarked of the black in one of his own paintings,
it is used as “a color of light and not as a color of darkness.” In various ways, in fact,
Avery is closer to Henri Matisse than to the styles that prevailed in America during his
lifetime - in his love of clarified form and flat color, for example, and in the sense of
rich serenity that permeates his art.
excerpt: MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, published 1999, revised 2004, p. 227
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There is a feeling of expansiveness, made even more striking in summer
by contrast to the populated and Fellini-esque town center. When cover
artist Milton Avery summered here from 1954 through 1960, he approached
the physical scale of his work in a new way. Smaller-sized paintings were
replaced by large, monumental canvases. Perhaps, it can be said, that the
same sea change in perspective
has occurred within those
who have spent years, or even
hours here.
