Milton Avery's Early Industrial Scenes Revealed at Knoedler & Company Exhibition

Knoedler and Company in New York City presented an exhibition from February 18 to May 1, 2010, focusing on Milton Avery's early industrial scenes from the 1930s, a period less examined than his later reductive landscapes. The show, titled "Industrial Revelations," highlighted works like The Blue Bridge (ca. 1930), where architecture and bridges take on organic, almost biological forms, contrasting with the Precisionist approaches of artists like Léger, Scheeler, and Demuth. Avery's paintings, such as Country Railyards (ca. 1930s) and New England Industry (ca. 1930s), depict depopulated, gloomy urban environments that evoke Giorgio de Chirico's desolation and suggest environmental foreboding. Despite not being as flat as his signature late-1940s style, these early pieces already show spatial compression and detail editing, with works like Tugboats in Harbor (ca. 1930) and City Harbor (ca. 1930) anticipating Philip Guston's late paintings in their muddled palettes and forms. Drawbridge (1932) features anthropomorphic tugboats, linking Avery's animate cityscapes to Giorgio Morandi's still lifes. The exhibition positioned Avery's cityscapes as personal, historical records that contrast with Edward Hopper's romanticism and Precisionist celebrations of technology, resonating with contemporary urban changes like the decline of railroads. Greg Lindquist, a painter and artcritical.com contributing editor who received a Sally and Milton Avery Foundation grant, authored the review.