Monday, September 05, 2005
Milton Avery
Milton Avery
(Article about him in Time magazine, March 16, 1970, page 58. Also, obit. of Sally Michel Avery, N.Y. Times,Jan. 26, 2003, page 23.)
I was drafted into the U.S. Army, 1952-'54, and while waiting for a specific assignment in Korea, I was temporarily at Ft. Lewis, near Seattle. Another draftee was also there, Phillip G. Cavanaugh. He had been an English major at Columbia ('52, as I had been '52 at Yale), and we became friends. I was sent to the front lines (Yekkogai, above the "38th parallel"), fortunately just a week-and-a-half before the fighting ended. Phil was assigned to be a photographer for the UN, in Seoul. There was an Army library in Seoul, intended to keep the troops out of trouble and reading good books. Phil became friends with a Korean young lady who was the head librarian there, Princess Yi Hai Kyung ("Amy Lee"). I had a lot of free time, after the fighting stopped (most of my year over there), so I visited Phil and/or Amy a lot, especially on weekends. I became Amy’s boyfriend, but Phil stayed loyal to his fiancee at home, March Avery (Barnard '52).
After we came home, I went to Rutgers to work toward an eventual Ph.D., and Phil worked on his at N.Y.U. Amy came to the U.S. and started grad school in music at Baylor, in Texas. We met from time to time in New York, along with March. Phil became a prof. at Wagner College on Staten Island, where his father was a prof., and Phil later moved to City U. of N.Y. and married March.
Milton Avery was just becoming famous as a painter. He had a big one-man show at the Whitney Museum, which was a very great honor, but he didn’t make much money. (I remember going to the Whitney show and being excited to think, "Wow, I know this guy!")
Milton was mainly supported by his wife, Sally Michel, who did regular illustrations for the N.Y. Times Magazine and Book Review and also painted. I used to see her initials on the drawings. (Also, she has something in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y.)
Milton and Sally had parties in their nice apartment in Greenwich Village, and I felt very good to be a guest at some of them. (I was one of the very few people of my age who were there.) Milton and Sally regularly spent summers at artists’ colonies such as Yaddo, and they had a lot of friends who showed up at the parties. The friends were mostly unsuccessful artists who had to do something else to earn a living, and I remember them as being hyper-intellectual and usually extreme-leftist. I dated Joan Rivers, who was a '52 classmate of March at Barnard, and I took her to one of those parties. Joan was not famous yet, and she was happy to see March again and meet Milton.
After Milton died, his paintings suddenly became worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Sally got rich. A big coffee-table book was written by Robert Hobbs, "Milton Avery," Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1990. There are other books about him. also, in amazon.com.
Phil and March moved into the apartment. March and their son Sean are both painters. (Amy Lee became the librarian of the Korean Rare Books Collection at Columbia University, which her father’s estate had donated.) They had inherited so much money from the Avery estate, that they established the foundation to help struggling young artists. Their son, Sean, is the nearly-full-time administrator of it (although he is also a part-time painter, himself). In recent years, I went to several of the opening-day parties of one-man shows, where galleries were exhibiting paintings by March, and later by Sean.
(Article about him in Time magazine, March 16, 1970, page 58. Also, obit. of Sally Michel Avery, N.Y. Times,Jan. 26, 2003, page 23.)
I was drafted into the U.S. Army, 1952-'54, and while waiting for a specific assignment in Korea, I was temporarily at Ft. Lewis, near Seattle. Another draftee was also there, Phillip G. Cavanaugh. He had been an English major at Columbia ('52, as I had been '52 at Yale), and we became friends. I was sent to the front lines (Yekkogai, above the "38th parallel"), fortunately just a week-and-a-half before the fighting ended. Phil was assigned to be a photographer for the UN, in Seoul. There was an Army library in Seoul, intended to keep the troops out of trouble and reading good books. Phil became friends with a Korean young lady who was the head librarian there, Princess Yi Hai Kyung ("Amy Lee"). I had a lot of free time, after the fighting stopped (most of my year over there), so I visited Phil and/or Amy a lot, especially on weekends. I became Amy’s boyfriend, but Phil stayed loyal to his fiancee at home, March Avery (Barnard '52).
After we came home, I went to Rutgers to work toward an eventual Ph.D., and Phil worked on his at N.Y.U. Amy came to the U.S. and started grad school in music at Baylor, in Texas. We met from time to time in New York, along with March. Phil became a prof. at Wagner College on Staten Island, where his father was a prof., and Phil later moved to City U. of N.Y. and married March.
Milton Avery was just becoming famous as a painter. He had a big one-man show at the Whitney Museum, which was a very great honor, but he didn’t make much money. (I remember going to the Whitney show and being excited to think, "Wow, I know this guy!")
Milton was mainly supported by his wife, Sally Michel, who did regular illustrations for the N.Y. Times Magazine and Book Review and also painted. I used to see her initials on the drawings. (Also, she has something in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y.)
Milton and Sally had parties in their nice apartment in Greenwich Village, and I felt very good to be a guest at some of them. (I was one of the very few people of my age who were there.) Milton and Sally regularly spent summers at artists’ colonies such as Yaddo, and they had a lot of friends who showed up at the parties. The friends were mostly unsuccessful artists who had to do something else to earn a living, and I remember them as being hyper-intellectual and usually extreme-leftist. I dated Joan Rivers, who was a '52 classmate of March at Barnard, and I took her to one of those parties. Joan was not famous yet, and she was happy to see March again and meet Milton.
After Milton died, his paintings suddenly became worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Sally got rich. A big coffee-table book was written by Robert Hobbs, "Milton Avery," Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1990. There are other books about him. also, in amazon.com.
Phil and March moved into the apartment. March and their son Sean are both painters. (Amy Lee became the librarian of the Korean Rare Books Collection at Columbia University, which her father’s estate had donated.) They had inherited so much money from the Avery estate, that they established the foundation to help struggling young artists. Their son, Sean, is the nearly-full-time administrator of it (although he is also a part-time painter, himself). In recent years, I went to several of the opening-day parties of one-man shows, where galleries were exhibiting paintings by March, and later by Sean.
