Morning Talk was among the final large-scale canvases of Milton Avery’s career. In the early 1960s, he began to work at a large scale more selectively, refining long-standing concerns with proportion, color, and paint density. Over the next year, he produced a small group of canvases in which these late insights are brought into sharp focus. As Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell noted, Avery’s physical frailty “made it difficult to control the brush and he became depressed at his inability to translate into oil what he believed would have been the most profound images he had yet created.”[1]

Haskell identified physical limitation as one factor contributing to the thinness of paint in Avery’s final canvases, but variations in paint density had been among his abiding concerns throughout his mature work. In broad terms, one can trace Avery’s artistic evolution through his handling of paint. His early works were often built up with dense passages of pigment, allowing for van Gogh–like impasto or the back-of-the-brush carving he absorbed from Matisse. As Avery grew increasingly confident as a colorist, subtle chromatic shifts were achieved not through emphatic brushwork but through the application of layered, translucent veils of pigment. His experiments with oil on paper and other unconventional combinations of vehicle and support further informed his high color-field works. By the 1960s, his spare, expansive canvases were reduced to a handful of simple forms, allowing color relationships to dominate.

The boldness of Avery’s chromatic decisions remained undiminished; Morning Talk is a dazzling example. Nearly square in format, the composition embraces a sophisticated arrangement of flattened, interlocking planes of color. The subject is a simple domestic one, and while a note of Edward Hopper–like ennui can be sensed in the conversants, Avery’s characteristic sunniness ultimately settles over the scene. This balance marks one of Avery’s great pictorial achievements: bracing innovation in pictorial language without the weighty solemnity that characterized much Abstract Expressionist painting.

Throughout his career, Avery’s work was favorably compared to master innovators of color and light. Critic Hilton Kramer extended these comparisons further, remarking of a painting by Claude Monet that “the shape of the foreground form acquires . . . a very Averyish look.”[2] While the direction of influence clearly runs from Monet to Avery, such critical reversals marked a significant development in the understanding of Avery’s achievement. His work—particularly these very late, large-scale canvases—emancipated color and light with a directness that earlier modernists only anticipated, and proved influential for a generation of Color Field painters and Minimalists.

“What was Avery’s repertoire?” Mark Rothko asked in a commemorative essay:

His living room, Central Park, his wife, Sally, his daughter, March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio window: a domestic, unheroic cast.[3]

This, too, was a victory hard won. Along with Willem de Kooning, Avery remained committed to subject matter during a period when New York painting was increasingly dominated by abstraction. Rothko concluded, “But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.”[4]

[1] Barbara Haskell, Milton Avery (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), 179

[2] Hilton Kramer, quoted in Haskell, Milton Avery (1982)

[3] Mark Rothko, quoted in Haskell, Milton Avery (1982), 181

[4] Ibid