Art: Seaside Painting

Out the back door was Provincetown’s harbor, with gulls wheeling and blue water glinting in the September sun. Within, on the white walls of the HCE Gallery* hung seven huge canvases that seemed to catch the seaside shimmer and give back a tranquil reflection of the dune bushes, the Cape Cod fish pier, the cool blue of the sea. They were the latest work of Painter Milton Avery, whose clear, thinly brushed colors, picturing simple scenes, have earned him, at 65. a quiet, spreading fame.

Artist Avery’s day has been a long time coming. Though his work now hangs in ten top U.S. museums, he has long been more a favorite with painters than with the public. But Avery. a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man with cornflower-blue eyes, has always stood outside art movements. “I’m pretty hard to catalogue,” he says.

Avery got interested in art as a youth in Hartford, Conn., when he began taking illustration courses by mail. He worked in a typewriter factory at night to leave his days free for sketching from nature in the East Hartford meadows along the Connecticut River. At 33, he married a 20-year-old girl he met in the next-door studio in Gloucester, Mass., Commercial Artist Sally Michel, who now draws for the New York Times Magazine. The couple set up housekeeping in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square, but Avery’s heart belonged to the country. In the summer the two, later accompanied by their daughter March, set up easels in such places as the Gaspe Peninsula, Provincetown, California, Mexico, Europe.

Over the years Avery clarified his colors, refined his images to near abstractions. “I always take something out of my pictures,” he explains. The resulting discipline on occasions allows Avery to produce prodigiously. “He told me he thought he had exhausted all the Provincetown subjects,” recalls Gallery Owner

Halper, “then early in August he suddenly turned out eleven paintings.”

On display last week, Avery’s sudden end-of-the-summer spurt made a glowing show. Hot Moon hung in the August sky like a ball of orange light that cast an orange sheen over the magenta sea; Sail shows a ghostly boat slipping silently through a sea of rapid blue and white strokes. “When people ask me how long it took,” Avery explained. “I say 30 years. That’s how long the preparation took.”

* Named for the protagonist of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, who is a fiction favorite of the owner of the gallery, Nat Halper.