My Avery Family Story

By Robert Selkowitz

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Coming up at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock on Saturday August 15th at 3 p.m. is a conversation I will be moderating with Avery family member Sean Cavanaugh, collector Harvey S. Shipley, and artist Robert Selkowitz. Harvey and Robert formed a close association with Sally Avery, and Robert authored the recollection that follows.

Also coming up at the Kleinert-James on Saturday August 29th at 3 p.m is my second gallery talk on the exhibition Going Upstate: The Avery Family in Woodstock.

Rosella Hartman and the Animal Sculptors of Woodstock opens at the Historical Society of Woodstock on Saturday September 5th. The opening is from 3 to 5 p.m., I will be speaking briefly at 4 p.m.

 Sally in Japanese Coat, Bearsville, New York, July 1975

Sally Avery (1902-2003)

Young Family, 1979

Oil on canvas

(Robert Selkowitz and his wife Nancy and daughter Bhakta]

I grew up in a home with a half dozen Milton Avery oil paintings in the 1950s. My father Harry was a CPA and Sally’s brother Charlie introduced my father to the Averys and he became their accountant. Whether by barter or purchase, we had a collection in the 1950s that was second to Roy Neuburger. It included The Strange Fish, a good sized canvas that was in Milton’s 1953 Baltimore Retrospective, it still has the label on the back. Once I became close to Sally in the 1970s, she told me there were years in the 1950s when Milton did not sell a single painting. She also said it was her ambition to see a Milton Avery painting sell for a million dollars. She achieved that ambition.

I was born in 1951 and in 1953 Milton and Sally attended my brother Anton’s Bar Mitzvah, I have a photo of them at a table for dinner. When I was a senior at Cornell University, in the Fall of 1972, I contacted Sally to see if she would allow me to interview her about Milton and their life together. I had resolved to become a painter and had always been inspired by Milton’s work, making presentations in school about him to classmates. Sally invited me to visit at her home in Bearsville, NY over Thanksgiving weekend. I would be able to meet March and Wallace Putnam, Milton’s oldest friend, who also became a mentor to me.

I started at Cornell as an engineering student, but transferred to Arts & Sciences and ended by being a Social Relations major, while always having a painting class on my schedule. My Milton Avery project was supported by my Art History Professor. H. Peter Kahn (Wolf Kahn’s brother) and professor Thomas Kirsch in Anthropology. I came to Bearsville with a tape recorder under the auspices of the Oral History Program at the New York State Archives at Olin Library. I was the first undergraduate to participate in this program.

I recorded conversations with Sally and Wallace Putnam and began a long mentorship with them both. Sally invited me to her apartment on Central Park West to continue our talks and to see Milton’s work. I photographed dozens of Milton Avery works that we brought out of their storage room. Sally made me an omelet for lunch. During my research I also visited Altmar, the obscure town where Milton was born and grew up in the snow belt of Lake Ontario in the desolate fields of far north New York State. Wallace quotes Milton as saying it was a good place to come from. I recently found the report I wrote in 1972 and I was struck by it noting Milton’s birth year as 1893. It has been established in recent years that Milton was born in 1885. Sally said they changed the date so he wouldn’t seem so old to her family, Sally was born in 1902. However, that means when Milton moved to Hartford in 1905, he was twenty and not 12.

I kept in touch with Sally and Wallace Putnam and in the Fall of 1975 moved to the Woodstock area with my wife Nancy. In Spring 1976 we began frequent visits to Sally at her Bearsville home. I was 24 and Sally was 74, I am now 74 as I write this. Sally was a tiger at croque and had a zest for life. We swam in her pool, along with Woodstock artist friends, Mary Frank was a frequent visitor. Sarah Kuniyoshi, Peter Rudolf (Lillian Fiolic), Trudy Jarvis, Dorothy Varian were friends.  Sally introduced me to gallery owners, and they exhibited my paintings. Rudolf Gallery sold one of my oils for $60, I think.

Sally always had a sketchbook and pens and would sketch everyone who came to visit. She would work up canvases from her sketches and did many painting of Nancy and me and later Nancy and me with our daughter Bhakta. Some of these canvases were featured in Sally Michel brochures from her exhibits at Katherina Perlow Gallery in later years. I sketched along with Sally. I would drive her to weekly sketch classes at the Woodstock Artists Association, and we would sketch together. I drove her into the countryside around Woodstock and did an oil painting portrait of Sally Sketching Sheep that is in the collection of the Historical Society of Woodstock . I have the sketches from that outing in a small sketch book. One time we went to Olana for a picnic. We both sketched Nancy and Bhakta on the picnic blanket, with baskets and the landscape. We both made large oils from those sketches. This was in 1978,

Bhakta was born on March 13^th, 1978. My painting of my wife and daughter is in a private collection in Woodstock. From 1977 to 1979 Nancy and I lived in Mount Tremper and this was the peak of our relationship with Sally. Sally would rent a car for the summer, but didn’t like to drive, so I was often at the wheel of her car our one of ours. We had a 1975 MG Midget and a 1962 Jaguar Mk10 at the time, and Sally loved riding in either of those cars. She would paint with an easel set up in the driveway just outside her garage door. Big canvases, 40 x 50, 36 x 48 were painted from sketches in large areas of color. My work at this time was heavily influenced by Sally, I painted in light washes of oil color on large canvases and also smaller oils on masonite of views around our area. During this time, Sam Klein, the collector, great supporter of Woodstock artists and creator of the archivves now housed at the Woodstock Artsts Association and Museum, put me together with the artist Dan Gelfand to transport a summer’s worth of Sally paintings to Central Park West. Dan had an old van and I was the connection to Sally. Dan is my longest standing friend in Woodstock dating from that meeting at Sally’s garage.

Sally was focused on promoting Milton’s work, not her own. Her vision was elevated, she said Woodstock was “small potatoes.” I did manage to give Sally a solo exhibit at the Erfp Catskill Cultural Center in Arkville, NY in the summer of 1980, while I was program director. By this time Nancy, Bhakta and I had moved to Andes, NY in Delaware County and our contact with Sally was more limited. We kept in touch and March would mail us announcements for her exhibits in NYC. I enrolled in the founding class of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 1981, with Sally’s recommendation. I earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1984 and began a long career as an artist. I am still painting and selling work.

My 1972 project explored Milton’s way of working and his sense of the world. Wallace Putnam contributed his recollections about Milton; they had been friends since the 1920s. We agreed that Milton had a Zen like stillness and calm in his demeanor and later work. For me, encountering a Milton Avery painting instills a heart throb of recognition. I find his harmonies of color very beautiful. Bathers by the Sea, Poetry Reading, Tangerine Moon and Wine Dark Sea are some favorites, as well as many of his seascapes, which take my breath away. Wallace Putnam said in his essay, “Pencil or brush in hand, he put down directly the essential beauty-meaning that his poet-self saw at once.” Mark Rothko said at the memorial for Milton on January 7, 1965, “Avery is first a great poet. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.” The actor and writer Steve Martin is an Avery collector. In Martin’s book, A Thing of Beauty, the ‘thing’ is a Milton Avery oil painting that a gallery dealer takes home. I grew up with this work in my home. The paintings were not flashy or imposing, but they did impart a sense handmade process that was inviting. Their beauty was in their naturalness.

I last saw Sally at the Kleinert Gallery in Woodfstock in the 1990s. I kept in touch with March and was able to obtain grants from the Milton and Sally Foundation for the Arts for projects in the Catskills. I knew Sean as a child, we inherited some of his childhood gear for Bhakta in the late 1970s. I have followed March’s paintings and Sean’s. I knew Philip Cavanaugh’s photography.  It is gratifying to keep in touch with Sean. Bhakta named her daughter Avery, she felt like it was a family name and our Avery just turned 11.

I want to come back to the sense of beauty in Avery’s work. Andrew Jackson Downing characterized beauty as “a worship by the heart of a higher perfection manifested in material forms.” To be able to create work that inspires a sense of beauty is a blessing. When I see a scene that is beautiful, that is what I want to paint.