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Lot Essay
Milton Avery traveled to Europe for his first and only time in 1952, spending three months with his wife March and daughter Sally in London, Wales and France. Their French explorations spanned the country, from Paris and Dieppe in the north to Saint-Tropez and Aix-en-Provence along the Mediterranean. During his travels, he saw work by Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Matisse, and kept a sketchbook of the landscapes, seaside vistas and architecture that caught his eye. These drawings inspired large-scale canvases upon his return to New York, including The Seine (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and March on the Balcony (March at Saint-Tropez) (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), as well as Montauban. Inspired by Avery’s visit to the town of Montauban in southwestern France, the present work is a striking example of the simplified forms and flattened space that are hallmarks of Avery’s later compositions.
In Montauban Avery transforms the spare elements of a quiet intersection in the town into a carefully balanced composition of form and color. The tranquility, yet lushness of the scene derives from Avery’s technique of applying multiple thin layers of oil paint to achieve chromatic harmonies of striking subtlety. After carefully selecting and applying color, Avery would often use a rag to manipulate the paint within a shape to create subtle modulations of tone, or introduce scumbled paint to create a sense of contrasting movement. In Montauban, this textural element is particularly visible in the foliage of the trees, which merges into a medley of analogous green hues overdrawn with curling, textural lines.
This more playful coloration is balanced by the rich blacks, purples and maroons at the left side of the painting, which at once both ground the scene and pull the viewer deeper into Avery’s vision. His juxtaposition of these closely-toned, dark color blocks creates a distinct resonance, which makes evident how Avery was an influence on his younger friend Mark Rothko. Indeed, upon Avery’s death on January 3, 1965, Rothko wrote: “This conviction of greatness, the feeling that one was in the presence of great events, was immediate on encountering his work.” (Address given by Mark Rothko at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, January 7, 1965)
In Montauban Avery transforms the spare elements of a quiet intersection in the town into a carefully balanced composition of form and color. The tranquility, yet lushness of the scene derives from Avery’s technique of applying multiple thin layers of oil paint to achieve chromatic harmonies of striking subtlety. After carefully selecting and applying color, Avery would often use a rag to manipulate the paint within a shape to create subtle modulations of tone, or introduce scumbled paint to create a sense of contrasting movement. In Montauban, this textural element is particularly visible in the foliage of the trees, which merges into a medley of analogous green hues overdrawn with curling, textural lines.
This more playful coloration is balanced by the rich blacks, purples and maroons at the left side of the painting, which at once both ground the scene and pull the viewer deeper into Avery’s vision. His juxtaposition of these closely-toned, dark color blocks creates a distinct resonance, which makes evident how Avery was an influence on his younger friend Mark Rothko. Indeed, upon Avery’s death on January 3, 1965, Rothko wrote: “This conviction of greatness, the feeling that one was in the presence of great events, was immediate on encountering his work.” (Address given by Mark Rothko at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, January 7, 1965)