In the late 1950s, Milton Avery was at the peak of his career, though his health was deteriorating. He was praised by the influential critics Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer and celebrated in a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1960. The landscapes that Avery created during his final years, like Mountain and Meadow, constitute arguably his finest paintings. In 1957, while summering in Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, he began to produce large-scale landscapes that reflected the influence of abstract expressionism, with reductive forms and heightened color. In December of that year, Greenberg announced that Avery’s recent paintings “attest to a new and more magnificent flowering of his art. The latest generation of abstract painters in New York has certain salutary lessons to learn from him that they cannot learn from any other artist on the scene.” The most striking quality of Avery’s late work is its fluidity between representation and abstraction, which he achieved by reducing nature to an interplay of surface pattern and shape. Curator Barbara Haskell, who organized a 1982 retrospective of Avery’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, described this stylistic development as “poised between objective depictions and non-objective aesthetic issues; by anchoring his work in subject matter while simultaneously giving fundamental importance to formal characteristics, Avery reconciled modernism with his own commitment to recognizable imagery.”
The initial inspiration to paint Mountain and Meadow occurred in the summer of 1955, when Avery and his family stayed at the Yaddo artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, New York. One day, as they were driving near the border of Vermont and Massachusetts, they stopped for a picnic, and Avery sketched the surrounding landscape. The imagery in the resulting painting, made five years after the initial drawings, has been reduced to the point of abstraction, so that the descriptive title is necessary to identify the subject. Avery refined the scene to five large, gracefully patterned, interlocking areas of space. He subtly manipulated and layered his pigments to create shimmering expanses of color. This mottled painting technique creates an illusion of three-dimensionality on the canvas. A consummate colorist, Avery achieved a sense of the verdant green land by applying thin layers of paint in a reduced palette. To an even greater extent than other examples of Avery’s monumental late works, Mountain and Meadow possesses a profound sense of serenity that portrays nature at its most majestic.
This painting was donated to the National Gallery of Art in 1991 by Avery’s widow, Sally Michel (American, 1902 - 2003), who was also an accomplished artist. In the same year, the Avery family established the Milton Avery Print Archive at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2002 Michel donated a number of her husband’s sketchbooks to the museum.
Robert Torchia
July 24, 2024
