The Creative Life of Milton Avery: ‘Why Talk When You Can Paint?’

Husband and Wife, 1945 by Milton Avery. © 2022 Milton Avery Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London

‘I always take something out of my pictures, strip the design to essentials. The facts do not interest me so much as the essentials of nature.'
Milton Avery

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of American artist Milton Avery (Royal Academy, London until 16 October).

From working class stock, Avery took factory jobs to sustain him while he studied art. Continuing to attend night classes and visiting galleries at the weekend, for the most part he laboured in obscurity, creating a painting every day in his small New York apartment. Never affiliated to any particular group, he created a bridge between American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism and inspired younger artists to follow their own path. 

Avery teaches us a good deal about living a truly creative life.

‘I never have any rules to follow. I follow myself.’

Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, the son of a tanner, Avery grew up in Connecticut. He left school at 16 and spent a decade working in different blue-collar jobs - as an aligner, an assembler, a latheman and a mechanic.

With a view to acquiring more lucrative skills, Avery enrolled in an evening class in ‘commercial lettering’ at the Connecticut League of Art Students. Soon after, his tutor advised him to transfer to life drawing. In 1917 he began working nights in order to paint in the daytime. 

Blue Trees, 1945 (Collection Neuberger Museum of Art)

From the Impressionists Avery adopted the practice of drawing and painting outdoors, en plein air. His early work captured the essential beauty of blossoming trees, peaceful rivers, big skies and setting suns.

In 1924 Avery met Sally Michel, a young art student, and two years later they married and moved to New York. Her income as a commercial illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting. 

The Averys spent the summer months in the country, where he made sketches and painted watercolours. Once back in New York, he translated these into oils in their modest apartment. (He didn’t have a studio.)

'Nature is my springboard. From her I get my initial impetus. I have tried to relate the visible drama of mountains, trees, and bleached fields with the fantasy of wind blowing and changing colors and forms.'

Avery’s daughter March recalls that he approached his art ‘like a factory worker.’

‘He was always painting in the living room…He would get up, have breakfast – coffee and an English muffin – and get to work. At noon, break for lunch. He would then paint in the afternoon until about 5 pm.'
March Avery Cavanaugh

March in Brown, 1954.
Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 81.3 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Victoria Miro, London

Avery was a taciturn man. Days would go by without him saying a word. 

‘Why talk when you can paint?’

The Averys spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums, including, from 1929, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art. They regularly hosted soirees, their guests including young artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. Avery sat quietly sketching, while the attendees discussed art and read poetry, and black cocker spaniel Picasso demonstrated his latest tricks.

Gradually Avery’s landscapes evolved beyond naturalistic representation: views were simplified and details omitted; planes were flattened, colours and shapes distorted. His work became more abstract.

Avery also painted intimate domestic scenes, again in a colour-rich, minimalist style. March sits in quiet reflection, her chestnut hair wrapped in a neat babushka, her face delicately etched, her torso distilled into a plum-coloured flat form. A husband and wife relax at home, she in a cornflower blue dress, arms folded, he in a brown suit and cobalt bow tie, puffing on his pipe. 

'I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.’

Avery participated in a number of small group exhibitions, and a few of his paintings were purchased by major museums and collectors. But for the most part he was under the radar. It was not until 1952, when he was 67, that he received his first full-scale retrospective. 

As he grew older Avery’s art continued its journey towards abstraction. He thinned his pigments and painted blocks of colour on the canvas in closely related tones. And yet his work always retained some connection to the original inspiration.

Boathouse by the Sea, 1959
Oil on canvas. 182.9 x 152.4 cm, 72 x 60 in © [2022] The Milton Avery Trust. Courtesy Victoria Miro

Two cream-sailed yachts trace their way through a flamingo-pink sea. A view of a boathouse is reduced to horizontal planes of black, yellow, turquoise and orange. Amber and lemon beach blankets sit alone on peach sand beneath a butterscotch sky. 

Avery’s colours express an intense sense of time and place. 

‘I eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and pattern.'

Avery died in 1965 following a long illness, and, appropriately, he was buried in the Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, New York. The painters that had so enjoyed his hospitality were forever grateful for his encouragement.

'Avery is first a great poet. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.’ Mark Rothko tribute to Milton Avery, 1965

Avery was driven by a love of art, of nature and of colour. He wasn’t looking for attention or recognition. He teaches us that a creative life requires total dedication, an independent spirit, a generous heart and an endlessly curious mind.

'Art is like turning corners, one never knows what is around the corner until one has made the turn.’

'The corner, where struggle and greed fight.
We write songs about wrong ‘cause it’s hard to see right.
Look to the sky, hoping it will bleed light.
Reality's a bitch, and I heard that she bites
The corner.
The corner was our Rock of Gibraltar, our Stonehenge
Our Taj Mahal, our monument.
Our testimonial to freedom, to peace, and to love.
Down on the corner.’ 
Common, ‘The Corner’ (L Lynn/ K West/ A Oyewole/ U BHassan/ L Moore)

No. 388

‘Bringing Up Baby’: Recognising the Rules of Attraction

‘Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but - well, there haven't been any quiet moments.’
David Huxley, ‘Bringing Up Baby’

‘Bringing Up Baby’ is a sparkling 1938 romantic comedy directed by Howard Hawks. 

The film places charming but eccentric characters in absurd situations, and ensnares them in misunderstandings and misadventures. There’s fast-paced verbal fencing interwoven with farcical physical comedy. There’s an unlikely romance, a whiff of danger and a race against time. There’s a Brontosaurus skeleton missing just one bone, a leading man in a negligee and a leopard that can only be calmed by a refrain from 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby.' Many consider it the definitive screwball comedy.

A bespectacled Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a mild mannered palaeontologist who is planning to marry his serious minded colleague the next day. While playing a round of golf, he meets free spirited Susan Vance, played by Katharine Hepburn. They quarrel over a missing ball and she dents his car. At a smart restaurant that evening he slips over on an olive she has dropped, lands on his top hat and gets accused of stealing a purse. She has a wardrobe malfunction.

Susan concludes that David is most definitely the man for her.

'I know that I'm gonna marry him. He doesn't know it, but I am.’

After such a challenging set of encounters, David doesn’t seem so sure.

Susan: Well, don't you worry, David, because if there's anything that I can do to help you, just let me know and I'll do it.
David: Well, er … Don't do it until I let you know.

Susan has just been in receipt of a tame leopard named Baby. Giving David the impression that she is in peril, she lures him to her apartment. He pleads with her to make her escape.

David: Susan, you have to get out of this apartment!
Susan: I can't, I have a lease.

Next Susan persuades David to accompany her with Baby to her farm in Connecticut. There follows a series of scenes in which Baby goes missing; Susan’s dog runs off with David’s precious Brontosaurus bone; and another more dangerous leopard escapes from a nearby circus. Ultimately everyone ends up in jail.

Susan: Anyway, David, when they find out who we are, they'll let us out.
David: When they find out who you are, they'll pad the cell.

In the midst of all these madcap adventures Susan encounters a psychologist.

Susan: What would you say about a man who follows a girl around... And then, when she talks to him, he fights with her?
Psychologist: Well, the love impulse in men very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict…Without my knowing anything about it, my rough guess would be that he has a fixation on you.

This exchange seems to be at the heart of the movie’s characterisation of romance. True love, it suggests, involves internal tension: instinctive attraction encountering rational resistance and emotional uncertainty. It requires conflict to be resolved and struggle to be overcome. To this end Hawks cut several scenes in the middle of the film in which David and Susan declare their love for each other, and he resisted the studio’s request to remove Grant’s glasses.

I read in The Times (6 June 2020) about a study into the nature of human attraction conducted by Professor Gurit Birnbaum from Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

In previous research Birnbaum has shown that you can increase a potential partner’s interest in you by demonstrating to them that you like them.

'We found that when people feel greater certainty that a prospective romantic partner reciprocates their interest, they will put more effort into seeing that person again, and even rate the possible date as more sexually attractive than they would if they were less certain about the prospective date’s romantic intentions.’

Birnbaum’s more recent study adds a fresh and somewhat contrary perspective. Considering the online conversations of 130 single students, she found that if the object of the students’ affection underplayed their reciprocal interest, then the students were even more likely to desire them; and they would sign off in a way that indicated they would like to meet again. 

'Being hard to get signals that potential partners are worth pursuing because they have other mating alternatives and therefore can limit their availability… Potential partners who use this strategy give the impression that they can afford to do so because of their high market value.’

The research concluded that to be successful in the dating game requires a delicate balancing act.
 
'Daters would be advised to show initial interest in potential partners so as not to alienate them. However, they should keep some cards to themselves. For example, reciprocal and gradual opening up is desirable, spewing one’s emotions without control is not.'

This may all seem rather obvious and to chime with one’s own personal experiences. But how well do we apply the rules of attraction to our own work challenges and to the management of our careers?

Having been employed for many years in a service industry, I found that businesses often do a great deal to signal to Clients that they find them attractive. They fall over themselves in their eagerness to express their availability and enthusiasm for an assignment. But they do very little to suggest that they will be hard to get. 

By Birnbaum’s analysis, such behaviour indicates an inferior market value and almost certainly leads to lower levels of commercial success.

As it turned out there was also something a little hard to get about ‘Bringing Up Baby.’ Neither critics nor consumers were initially enamoured of the film, and Katherine Hepburn ended up having to buy herself out of her contract with the disappointed studio. Of course, in time love prevailed: audiences fell for the movie’s sophisticated charms and it became one of the world’s favourite comedies.

David: Now don't lose your head, Susan.
Susan: I've got my head, I've lost my leopard!

'I couldn't bear to be special,
I couldn't bear, couldn't bear.
So don't look at me and say
That I'm the very one
Who makes the cornball things occur,
The shiver of the fur.
Don't expect so much of me.
I'm just an also-ran.
There's a mile between
The way you see me and the way I am.
So, don't stare at me that way.
Of course it gives me pride,
But I won't take on the risk
Of letting down the sweet sweet side.’

Prefab Sprout, ‘Couldn’t Bear to Be Special’ (P Mcaloon)

No. 290