De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Brooklyn Rail: Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea
By Lyle Rexer | September 30, 2026
Mark Rothko, Untitled (wharf, Gloucester, Massachusetts), 1934. Watercolor on construction paper, 12 ¼ × 15 inches. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Collection of Christopher Rothko.
Let’s go to the beach! I know summer is over, but if you subscribe to poet Rene Ricard’s credo, “never get a job, never take a vacation,” then the beach is always open. Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb never took vacations even when they went to the beach. What they did there is the subject of a revelatory exhibition at the renovated and lovely Cape Ann Museum, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The exhibition will travel to the Phillips Collection, in Washington, DC, the collaborating institution, but close to the beach was the right place to see Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea.
The beach in question was not one made famous by artists and celebrities. Not Truro, on Cape Cod, and certainly not the Hamptons, but instead the one near the working-class fisherman’s town of Gloucester. Between 1932 and the late ’40s the three friends and their families took time from their urban studios to do something that liberated their work: they looked at the water, and everything around it—including people, landscapes, and the town itself. They also looked at each other’s work. The reactions each had to the place and to their visual conversations would have a profound impact on American art.
Milton Avery, Harbor at Night, 1932. Oil on canvas, 32 × 48 inches. © 2026 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.
That’s the explicit argument here, and the circumstantial evidence was most convincingly displayed in one room of the exhibition, containing a collection of later masterworks by all three artists: among others, Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow, Pink, Yellow on Light Pink) (1955), Gottlieb’s Under and Over (1959), and Avery’s The White Wave (1956). The influence of nature on Avery is the most obvious and perhaps the least interesting. His work seems to follow the reductive path articulated by critic Clement Greenberg: that Avery was in Gloucester first, an established artist who was already well along that trajectory—away from Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse toward flattened, abstracted forms—when he encouraged the two younger artists to join him on Cape Ann. He had probably already forgotten more about color than either of the other two would ever truly know, and they both revered him not just as a mentor but, in Gottlieb’s words, “a great artist.” Avery never does away with nature, a reason why his paintings are so appealing, even when they get big and a bit empty. In a smaller work like The White Wave, the graphic simplicity and flat surface pack a wallop.
Rothko’s relation to the open air is more complicated. All three artists sketched people on the beach, but where Avery’s blocky bathers show a clear inclination toward reduction, Rothko’s watercolor beachgoers are more like blots, a response to the color of things. His metaphysical musings and ambivalence about hiking aside (his friend Joseph Liss described him as “not much of a nature man”), Rothko seems never far from the complexities of atmosphere, in search of a method to render a new nature from the inside. Likewise, when he turns his eye on the wharf, it becomes an architecture of formal energy and color relations.
Adolph Gottlieb, Gloucester Street, ca. 1934. Oil on linen mounted on board, 11 ¾ × 17 ¼ inches. © 2026 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Gottlieb was the one most heavily influenced by Surrealism, and Gloucester gave him the occasion to begin incorporating its various symbolic elements. Two small oils, Gloucester Street (1934) and Rockport (1932), a nearby town on Cape Ann, have the arid mystery of Giorgio de Chirico’s artificial landscapes. In later paintings, the beach becomes a kind of stage for boxlike structures containing seashore items such as fish and seashells, which take on a dreamlike significance. It’s not a long step from that to the flat grids of psycho-mythic symbols that defined his work in the 1940s. Of course, coherence is always imputed retrospectively, which may be why nature is so important for this exhibition, for provoking surprise. Being at the beach gave the artists permission—to play, to find a path, to diverge. One of my favorite Rothkos epitomizes it: Iphigenia and the Sea/Horizontal Phantasy (1943). With its classical reference, biomorphic forms, and even what appears to be a beach umbrella, the artist was working through Pablo Picasso’s persistent influence, and having some fun.
Of course, Gloucester was a real place, where people worked and struggled, not just lounged at the beach. Those troubles rarely show up, even in the sketches and notebooks. Even Avery, the long-timer and member of the local art society, appreciates Gloucester primarily for the play of weather, mood, and rough architecture. Of course, if anything is real to a Gloucesterman, it’s the weather, and Avery evokes it in dark paintings of the harbor. It is a striking progress from the diaphanous Post-Impressionism of Gloucester Dawn (1921) to the stark Harbor at Night (1932). Gottlieb’s sketches of the wharf are very much about booms, cranes, and fishing boats, but nowhere in any of the pictures is anyone hauling in a fish or mending a net. Only Avery nods briefly to the fisherman. I sense an assiduous avoidance of the picturesque, on the one hand, and the pitfall of social realism on the other. That isn’t why they came to the beach.
Also largely missing is Sally Michel Avery, the artist’s wife, and an artist in her own right. She was represented by only one small watercolor, but as the catalogue suggests, she was far more active in the discussions and painting sessions than the show implies, and she was important to Avery for more than just getting him up off the couch and to work. Of course, it makes sense to focus on the Big Three, but that single painting introduced a note of incompleteness to the origin story this entrancing exhibition sought to tell.
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