De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Boston Globe: Unearthly light: Abstraction Expressionism’s Gloucester connection
Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Milton Avery summered and painted together on the North Shore. Their work will be on view at Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum.
by Murray Whyte | May 13, 2026
Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum has been closed for more than a year for a major renovation, but its reopening June 30 will be more than worth the wait. Its stately new building will welcome “Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko: By the Sea‚” a big-time blockbuster worthy of the museum’s much larger peers.
CAM has been down this road before: In 2023, its exhibition about the last-chance inspiration that Cape Ann gave to American icon Edward Hopper was a triumph, and a model of how small-scale institutions can punch above their weight. Let us not forget, though, that Cape Ann is special; its rocky shores and unearthly northern-coastal light have been igniting the creative fire of seminal American arists for generations, from Luminist forefather Fitz Henry Lane in the 19th century through Winslow Homer, John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and others.
But of them all, Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism’s high priest of the oblique sublime, surely tops the marquee. But the dissonance between his most famous work and his pieces here are sure to startle and delight: Who knew that Rothko, famous for his oppressive fogs of color that seem to hover in a suspended state of transformation, tried his hand at harbor scenes and beachscapes along the Massachusetts shore? Not many, and not enough.
In Gloucester, Rothko developed his vision and technique alongside Adolph Gottlieb, his close friend, and Milton Avery, a mentor to them both. Their time in Gloucester is as foundational to American Modern art as anything in New York, or anywhere else. I’ll take a longer look soon, but in the meantime, here is a sampling of three of the more than 80 works waiting for the grand reopening next month.
See? I told you you’d be surprised. This little watercolor, painted decades before Rothko became Rothko, is positively jaunty with its aquamarine shimmer of a water’s surface and bright canary-yellow wharf; and by the artist himself’s sombre standard, it’s outright euphoric. There’s something enchanting about an artist’s formative era, before he or she finds footing in a vision that comes to define their life’s work. This piece, painted on one of Rothko’s earliest forays up the coast with Avery, one of the artists he most admired, feels wobbly with equal parts enthusiasm and eagerness to please. It feels personal and unsure in the way his mature work feels distant and inscrutable. It feels like a work by a knowable human being, in other words, and not the mysterious wizardly presence in the darkness behind the curtain that he would eventually become.
Despite his profound influence on Rothko and a generation of his peers, including colorfield minimalist pioneer Barnett Newman, Avery never painted an abstract painting in his life. He did, however, love to tease at it. Whether as a playful foil to his devoutly abstractionist students or, more often, an intense study of color and proportion in his gleefully reductive images of both people and landscapes, Avery’s studious flattening of the picture plane and taste for the dynamic frictions of color and form were a model for Rothko and his ilk to both follow and resist. Case in point: If “Black Sea” were renamed “Untitled,” wouldn’t it fit neatly into the AbEx canon? But Avery rejected abstraction in his own work to the last, despite the occasional tease. (He joked, late in life, about painting bigger and bigger canvases “like the abstract boys.”) Ever moored to the knowable world, Avery’s tension with the rising movement was deliberate, and a generative challenge to a generation of artists finding their way.
Gottlieb and Rothko were close friends, painting confreres, and students of Avery’s at the Art Students League in New York. Their journeys were close parallels, though Gottlieb leaned into Surrealism more than his friend in his earlier years. This painting is a good example of the playful absurdist departures he would sometimes take. But the timing is important, too. Painted in 1938, Gottlieb had already embarked on his journey as a foundational Abstract Expressionist. He and Rothko had formed a group called “The Ten” in 1935, when he led the way in harnessing and merging the competing visions of abstraction and Expressionism, the direction this painting appears to be leaning. In 1943, roughly five years after he painted this piece in Gloucester, he and Rothko would co-author a letter in The New York Times announcing and defending the formative project of Abstract Expressionism — the first formal, publicly articulated statement of the very first homegrown American art movement that would soon stand atop the art world.
June 30-Sept. 27. Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester. 978-283-0455, capeannmuseum.org
To read the full Boston Globe article, click here.
