Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko: three masters by the sea
Pace Gallery presents a landmark exhibition celebrating the enduring creative friendship between Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, whose summers on Cape Ann shaped their artistic vision.
AI-assisted voice playback. Starts only when you choose Play.
The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC opens “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By The Sea” this autumn, a meditation on friendship, landscape and the transformative power of light. The exhibition brings together works by three painters whose summers spent in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann shaped not merely their technique but their philosophical approach to colour, form and the ineffable beauty of water and sky.
Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko found in Cape Ann a sanctuary from the intensity of urban artistic life. The sea, with its shifting tones and mercurial surfaces, became their muse. Avery’s flattened horizons and ochre tonalities evoke the specific warmth of New England summers. Gottlieb’s gestural abstractions capture the raw energy of crashing waves. Rothko’s floating rectangles of deep amber and violet seem to hold within them the memory of sunsets and the profound silence of a shoreline at dusk. Seen together, their works form a conversation between artists united by geography, ambition and mutual respect.
The gallery walls, painted in warm charcoal and soft greens, create an intimate setting that allows each canvas to breathe. A warm wood floor reflects gallery light as if water itself. Benches invite prolonged looking, the kind of sustained contemplation these paintings reward.
“Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By The Sea” runs through January 24, 2027. Pace Gallery also shows works by Gottlieb and Rothko in “Gottlieb/Rothko: The Surrealist Years,” opening November 13 at 125 Newbury in New York, extending this dialogue across two cities and decades of artistic practice.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
