Vermont Landscape 1943

Milton Avery made this pencil sketch, Vermont Landscape, on a page torn from a notebook. The apparent spontaneity of the sketch—the visible haste of the artist—reflects a social movement underway in American art that sought to break away from the constraints of academic training. In the early- to mid-20th century, when Avery was active, many artists searched for ways of working that were both direct and honest, and that seemed to represent the immediate experience of the artist, apart from tradition. Avery, in particular, was associated with a group of artists working in New York who wanted to translate the lessons of European modernism into a distinctly American idiom, often through depictions of the American landscape. To fully understand Avery’s artistic choices, we can consult not only his sketchbooks and finished paintings, but also the exhibition histories of the galleries in which he showed and the critical reviews his work attracted. The meaning of this image lies in this wider social and institutional context.