Startled Goats

Throughout his career, Milton Avery repeatedly returned to depictions of the American landscape, exploring its hills and fields in a progressively abstract manner. Simultaneously, his depictions of animals have been a cornerstone of his oeuvre—including depictions of chickens, goats, pigs and birds. Painted in 1957, Startled Goats combines these two signature themes into a dynamic and charismatic image. Furthermore, the work embodies the transition from his earlier, more representational style to the reductive abstraction of his mature career. In Startled Goats, Avery manifests both his identity as a master colorist and his ability to capture the essence of his subject.

Avery reduces the natural environment in the present work to its most essential elements composed of largely monochromatic forms—from the amber hillside with spirited leaves of grass incised into the surface, to the ebbing line of burgundy and green trees and delightful bubblegum pink sky. This stylistic approach imbues the painting with vitality and creates a dancing surface, alluding to the movement and texture experienced on this day in the countryside. Two goats occupy the center of the composition—one facing the viewer, perhaps in a state of surprise at our presence, while the other looks off into the distance. Set within this expansive landscape, Startled Goats effortlessly fuses the artist’s animal and landscape imagery. As in many of his landscapes, Avery is not interested in transcribing a meticulous scene with identifiable details innate to the site; rather, he seeks to capture a more profound virtue in Startled Goats—the fundamental spirit of the place.

Painted in 1957, Startled Goats possibly depicts the Catskills region, where the Avery family had spent the warmer months since 1949. 1957 also proved to be a pivotal year for Avery, as it was when he reunited with his friends and fellow artists Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The summer was transformative for Avery and resulted in him working on larger canvases and in a more abstract style. Hilton Cramer explains, “By the summer of 1957, when they found themselves reunited in Provincetown, Mass., all three were firmly established as recognized masters…Yet all three appear to have embraced their reunion with a sense of excitement and renewal. Both Gottlieb and Rothko had already embarked on new directions in their work: Gottlieb with his so-called Burst paintings, while Rothko was turning to a radically darker palette than he had heretofore been drawn to. In some respects, however, it was Avery’s art that underwent the most radical transformation as a result of the reunion with the younger painter-friends who had once sat at his feet, as it were.” (“The Summer of ’57 With Milton Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko,” Observer, 2002, https://observer.com/2002/05/the-summer-of-57-with-milton-avery-gottlieb-rothko/)

With works such as Startled Goats, Avery creatively furthers the tradition of landscape painting in America. The same year Avery painted the present work, Clement Greenberg wrote in his 1957 essay on the artist: "Avery’s is the opposite of what is supposed to be a typical American attitude in that he approaches nature as a subject rather than as an object. One does not manipulate a subject, one meets it. On the other hand, his employment of abstract means for ends—which, however, subtly or subduedly naturalistic, are nevertheless intensely so—is nothing if not American." ("Milton Avery," Arts, vol. 32, December 1957, p. 40)