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Oil on canvas
by Milton Avery
Taken in the Exhibition
By 1926 Avery was living in New York and working full-time as an artist. Avery took advantage of the access to art offered by the city, and he and his wife, Sally, spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums. In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened, allowing Avery’s interest in European Modernism to grow as he saw more examples of the movement’s works.
In addition to using the sketches he had executed throughout the summer months, Avery also turned to the city for inspiration for his paintings, in particular to its human activity and crowds.
[Royal Academy]
Milton Avery: American Colourist
(July — October 2022)
Recognised as an important and influential twentieth-century American artist, Milton Avery’s entry into the art world was somewhat unconventional. Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, into a working-class family that finally settled in Connecticut, near Hartford, Avery left school at sixteen to work in a factory. Four years later, in an attempt to improve his earning potential, he enrolled in an evening class in ‘commercial lettering’ at the Connecticut League of Art Students and soon after transferred to drawing, so commencing a fifteen-year part-time study of art and a lifetime dedicated to drawing and painting.
Avery’s work spanned and, to some extent, became the link between two significant movements in the United States in the twentieth-century, American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with both having an impact on his oeuvre. Through his close association with some of the younger key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Avery’s early work played an influential role in how the movement later developed and unfolded. Never affiliated to any particular group or tendency, Avery followed his own artistic inclination. With his steadfast adherence to representation and the innovative ways in which he balanced colour and form within his compositions, he often appeared to be running counter to the prevailing trends of the time.
In 1926 Avery was married and living in New York, where he was to three months every summer at different locations of natural beauty, where he documented the landscape, providing material and inspiration for the later studio paintings.
This retrospective survey presents a selection of Avery’s finest work from across his career and charts his constant development, revealing his unique ability to create exquisitely balanced poetic compositions of colour and form.
[Royal Academy]
ERICH HECKEL or German Expressionism
A magnificent exhibition in Ghent (Belgium)
At the end of 2024, the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK) dedicated an exhibition to the German artist Erich Heckel (1883-1970). Heckel was one of the leading figures of German Expressionism and a co-founder of the artists' association Brücke.
From the end of the 19th century, young artists in Germany resisted the fleeting nature of Impressionism. In Dresden, the Brücke artists' association was founded in 1905. The 22-year-old Erich Heckel was one of the co-founders. This association of self-taught artists aimed to express strong joie de vivre in a common style of bright colors and angular forms. This style is called Expressionism: the artist tries to convey inner emotions through form and color rather than objective reality.
At the outbreak of World War I, Heckel was in his early thirties. Nevertheless, he already enjoyed a solid reputation in Germany. During the war, he became acquainted with Flanders. As a nurse for the Red Cross, he traveled to Ghent, Roeselare, and Ostend. On the hospital train, assembled by Walter Kaesbach, a curator of the Berlin National Gallery, were other painters and writers. As a result, the emergency hospital at Ostend station grew into a true artists' colony. Heckel met James Ensor there and developed a special friendship with his fellow nurse, the young poet Ernst Morwitz, whose literary world had a significant influence on his visual work.
During the war, Heckel's artistic activities continued. Between their shifting duties, the members of the artists' colony had enough time to devote to their art. In addition to several paintings, many gouaches, watercolors, drawings, and graphic works have been preserved: views of Roeselare, Ostend, and Ghent, sometimes featuring picturesque figures and bathers, but also still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes.
Despite the historical context, Heckel's stay in Flanders extended beyond World War I. Heckel was not a 'war artist' but a nurse working mainly behind the front lines. As a draftsman, he made numerous sketches of the places he visited and the people he observed. As a painter, he was particularly impressed by the Flemish landscape and the North Sea, with their unique cloud formations where light always tries to break through; motifs that seemed both foreign and familiar to him. The Flemish landscapes reminded him of the early days of the Brücke, when Heckel and his friends Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff would go out to paint en plein air.
(Source : MSK GHENT – BELGIUM)
A male, who is walking or trying to dance. He had a strange approach in his behaviors that made me to give this name in the painting. It was created in quick poses for 5 or 10 minutes pose. It was a very interested practice that I tried to show all my feelings for model and the occasion.Movement, frustration, dance, self egoism, narcissism etc .It is a piece of personal experimentation/expressionism.
City Hall
The term Brick Expressionism (German: Backsteinexpressionismus) describes a specific variant of expressionist architecture that uses bricks, tiles or clinker bricks as the main visible building material. Robert Natus was an Estonian architect. His best known work is the current City Hall of Tallinn, built in 1932
I must upload the measurements of my paintings but this one is quite overbearing. However I made a compositional error when positioning the pot. I had no room to fit the flowers in and in a radical experiment I gave life to the heads of the plants by the way of smily faces. The bottom of the painting is the dark zone where I've shaded accordingly to the top of the painting but it is too vast to make sense of it. I think the bottom half would have benefitted from a reflection and self shadow of the overbearing pot and highlighted the plant heads.