Sally Michel: Brilliant Legacy: Morris Museum

Emerging from New York’s art scene of the Great Depression was the distinctive style developed by a remarkable couple: Sally Michel (1902-2003) and Milton Avery (1885-1965). Variously called Realist-Abstraction or Color Field Realism, their idiosyncratic look combined a fidelity to the observed world with geometric simplicity as they painted quotidian vignettes of people and nature in unexpected swaths of vivid color. Sally worked through the 1940s as a commercial artist to support their family and, even after Milton’s death in 1965, she saw to her role as the greatest champion of her husband’s work. All the while—from the moment of their first meeting in Gloucester, MA, during the summer of 1924 and through their four decades together through Milton’s death in 1965—they painted together and thought critically about the art of their time amid an incredible circle of painter friends such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnet Newman. Their shared approach to art underpinned Sally’s work through a very active period that stretched into the 1990s.

Organized by the Mennello Museum of American Art (Orlando, FL; and originally presented there as Sally Michel, Abstracting Tonalism), this exhibition and catalogue form the first major monographic project on Sally Michel’s work prepared in the new millennium. Mennello curator Katherine Page selected over fifty works ranging in date from the late 1930s to the early 1990s to propel a comprehensive exploration of her artistic production, career arc, and critical legacy. A catalogue essay by Eleanor Heartney, “Sally Michel and the Artist/Wife Problem,” plumbs the question of how seeing the artist’s work clearly has always been challenged due to Avery’s outsized reputation and the realities of the art world’s tendency to celebrate male accomplishment. Comprehensive in scope—and following the couple’s working sojourns away from New York to the Gaspe Peninsula, western Connecticut, the Gulf of Maine, and Woodstock, as well as a few of her commercial illustrations—this exhibition reintroduces New Jersey to her artistic accomplishment and her story.

 

This exhibition was organized by the Mennello Museum of American Art. Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism was curated by Katherine Page, Curator, Art and Education, Mennello Museum of American Art.

 

Generous funding for this exhibition and the publication is provided by The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Additional funding for the Morris Museum presentation courtesy of The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and other donors.