To the pantheon of women artists whose careers were eclipsed by their husband’s fame – Lee Krasner (m. Jackson Pollock), Mimi Gross (m. Red Grooms), and Ana Mendieta (m. Carl Andre) immediately come to mind – add Sally Michel.
Sally who?
Exactly. If you have to say that she was married to Milton Avery, that misses the point. Or perhaps that is the point.
Now – finally – Michel is the subject of a retrospective at the Morris Museum through May 4. Sally Michel, Brilliant Legacy originated at the Mennello Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida, and includes 40 paintings created between the 1930s and 1990s, showcasing Michel’s use of color, abstraction, and form.
Walk through the exhibition space – a former mansion designed by McKim, Mead & White on 8.5 acres in Morris Township – and you’ll immediately see the similarities in Michel and Avery’s work: flat planes of color, often textured with patterns of mark making. Who, exactly, influenced whom?
Michel (1902-2003), who kept her own name after marriage and signed her paintings “Sally Michel,” had a successful career as an illustrator for The New York Times and the like, and supported Avery and their daughter March until his career took off.
Born to a family of Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, Michel – who wasn’t religious -- knew she wanted to be an artist since first grade. She worked as a fashion illustrator at Macy’s before studying at the Art Students League.
Michel met Avery, 17 years her senior, at the Arts Colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1924, and he followed her back to New York where they wed and lived.
They continued to spend summers in Gloucester, then Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, the Smoky Mountains, Mexico, and out West, all of which provided rich subject matter.
“Her paintings capture intimate moments of domestic life, captivating landscapes, and even examples of her 1950s illustration work,” says Morris Museum President and CEO Thomas J. Loughman, who curated the exhibition (the version at the Mennello was curated by Katherine Page).
Back to the Avery style. Emerging from the New York art scene of the Great Depression, Michel and Avery’s vision of breaking the observed world into geometric simplicity was known as Realist Abstraction or Color Field Realism. Their circle of friends included artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnet Newman. Affinities with other 20th century painters – Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove – seem evident in Michel’s paintings at the Morris Museum.
In terms of who influenced whom, Loughman says it was symbiotic. “We're talking about two artists who actively discussed, debated, pulled at the idea of how they should use color and how they should use abstraction to power a new vein of art making,” he says.
Facial features are simplified, and oil paint was watered down to make it more like gouache. Paper towels were used to further remove more paint and create a suede-like surface. Michel’s fondness for coastal scenes and bathers is evident here, along with reflections of the setting sun and the resulting surreal color explosion.
Michel liked to paint nudes. “I feel like it’s doing my exercise. It keeps your mind sort of limber,” she is quoted in exhibition panels.
She liked to entertain friends in her home, preserving them in sketches and paintings.
Avery and Michel’s daughter, March, also became an artist, and the legacy carried on to her grandson, Sean Cavanaugh – who, coincidentally, had an exhibition at the Morris Museum a few years ago.
Loughman recounts a conversation with March in which she explained what enabled her parents’ summer escapes. “They were not people of great means at all,” says Loughman. “In fact, they very much lived a workaday lifestyle in lower Manhattan.” March told Loughman that the family moved every year. They would give up an apartment to get the down payment back and buy a car, travel for the summer and make art while living out of that car. At summer’s end they returned to the city, selling the car for the down payment on their next apartment.
Many of the couple’s destinations were to art colonies or enclaves, such as McDowell and Yaddo. “And then in the 60s with Milton's great success, the family was able to buy a place in Woodstock, New York,” says Loughman. “Milton and Sally are both buried in Woodstock.”
Through it all, Michel was Avery’s helpmate.
“In interviews, Michel reported that she willingly took on the traditional roles of the artist’s wife as muse, mother, hostess, and manager, even going as far as to write her husband’s artist statements so he could work unencumbered,” all while supporting the family and mothering their child, writes Eleanor Heartney in the exhibition catalog. She could only dedicate herself to her own artwork during their summer expeditions. “’I really thought Milton’s work was so much more important than mine.’”
A case could be made that without Michel’s help, Milton Avery might not have become Milton Avery, and so, in a sense, he is her creation. Perhaps his style emerged from their working together for four decades.
“Michel had a profound effect on Avery’s painting practice, and he usually followed her advice when she didn’t care for something in his work,” writes curator Katherine Page in the catalog.
Even after Avery died in 1965 Michel continued to advocate for his work and exhibitions, yet finally growing on her own, establishing exhibitions and a reputation.
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