Rare MICAS showcase brings American icon and seven major artists to Malta

He is the American master of colour who influenced the young artists from one of the most defining art movements of the 1950s. But it was not until the age of 67 that Milton Avery received his first full-scale retrospective museum exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, giving him a level of exposure he had not yet experienced, despite having been active for nearly 40 years.

By that time, the colour field artists that included Avery’s young friends Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, had become a major force in Abstract Expressionism. In the past decades, these artists had been regular visitors to the Avery household, whom Rothko and Gottlieb often joined on family holidays to Connecticut, to work together on sketches and paintings.

“Through his close association with some of the younger protagonists of Abstract Expressionism, Avery’s early work came to play an influential role in that movement’s development. These three colour field artists expressed their deep admiration for, and debt to, Avery’s work and practice throughout their careers,” says MICAS’s Edith Devaney, who this year will curate Malta Contemporary’s highlight of the year: a rare showcase of over 30 paintings by Milton Avery, only the second ever European outing following the 2022 Royal Academy show.

It is a coup for MICAS as much as it is for the fact that his works will be displayed alongside the paintings of artists who credit Avery as an influence, showing how his work continues to be held in high regard by some of the leading contemporary artists of our time.

For a young institution, it will be one of the most far-reaching of exhibitions in Malta: Devaney and MICAS’s chair of its international committee, the gallerist Waqas Wajahat, have encouraged the participation not just of Avery’s daughter March, an artist in her own right, but also the YBA and Royal Academician Gary Hume, Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, Andrew Cranston, Jonas Wood and Nicolas Party.

“The exhibition will take Avery slightly out of his time and allow us to look at him with fresh eyes,” Devaney says, who is digging deep into a great American epic that spans over 70 years of influence, to look at his artworks from a fresh perspective.

“It introduces a strand in Malta Contemporary’s programming, which is to take an occasional look back towards Modernism and examine how past practice continues, in some part, to shape current contemporary art,” says Devaney of the way Avery will stand side by side with American and European artists at the top of their game.

“This careful selection of works by participating artists will reveal their very personal relationship with Avery’s work, all tapping into very differing aspects of his practice.

“In exploring the artistic legacy of Milton Avery and how aspects of that legacy remain detectable in the work of some of today’s most celebrated artists, we intend to recontextualise not only his work, but that of all the contemporary participants, and in doing so, acknowledging the notion of art history not always linear.”

MICAS: growing influence

Today Avery’s works hang in hundreds of American institutions, widely credited as an ‘artist’s artist’ whose mastery of colour graduated from early Impressionist landscapes, to flattened forms that paved the way for the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s.

Waqas Wajahat, the chair of Malta Contemporary’s (MICAS) international committee, has long championed the work of Avery, believing his overlooked career was key in the development of modern art as it straddled American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

“While he learned from and responded to both movements, he never followed or committed to either,” says Wajahat, a collector who has worked with the Avery estate to bring over the exhibiton to MICAS. “He forged his own path.”

Wajahat, who serves on committees at the Lowe Art Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is excited. “Malta really has the potential to become a serious player in the global contemporary art scene, and the world is taking notice,” he says, citing how the African-American artist from Compton, Reggie Burrows-Hodges, has moved his studio to Malta after a visit to the island, while Sir Antony Gormley spent six days exploring MICAS.

“The impact is tangible, for artists are coming. These are not isolated events; they are signs of a growing momentum, of Malta carving out a place on the international art map.”

Avery: the artist’s artist

Because of the tranquil and distilled qualities of his landscapes, Avery’s works may have rested at the penumbra of the otherwise exuberant abstracts that came in his wake.

Born in western New York state to a working-class family, Avery was a factory labourer supporting his family until his thirties, while taking night classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students. He met his future wife while both were sketching on the rocks in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Avery and Sally Michel married in 1926, the couple painting side by side in the living room of their one-bedroom flat in Manhattan.

Avery’s output was prodigious. Sally supported them both with commercial-drawing work. Avery was inspired by his wife’s work to employ a simplified form, his frugal use of paint diluted with turpentine to develop a soft, understated style during the Depression years in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1928 Avery’s work was selected as part of a group exhibition at the new Opportunity Gallery that included the work of the young Rothko, marking the beginning of their friendship.

Throughout the next decades, summers spent in Provincetown in the company of Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb saw Avery developing more simplified forms, with colours that could deliver the “purity and essence of the idea… expressed in its simplest form.”

By the 1950s, Avery’s work developed from his Impressionist brushwork into broader fields of dark hues, finding himself at the threshold of abstraction, locking in his subject in ordered shapes, in his own words eliminating and simplifying, “leaving nothing but colour and pattern.”

Rothko would assert that Avery was America’s greatest painter – “his is the poetry of sheer loveliness”. A testament to the enduring legacy of Avery is the record sale of his 1945 interior scene The Letter, sold in 2022 by Sotheby’s New York for $6 million.