The Cape Ann Museum has opened a landmark exhibition titled "Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea," featuring 82 works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko. The show explores the artists' formative summers on Cape Ann in the 1930s and '40s, where they escaped New York City and developed a deep artistic camaraderie. The exhibition coincides with the reopening of the museum's main campus after 20 months of renovations, and will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in October—the first time a Cape Ann Museum-organized exhibition tours to a national museum.
This exhibition matters because it reframes three titans of 20th-century American art not solely as New York artists, highlighting the influence of the sea and their collaborative summers in Gloucester and Provincetown. It tells a previously untold story of mentorship and friendship, with Milton Avery acting as a mentor to the younger Gottlieb and Rothko. The show also traces the artists' stylistic evolution from early works to large-scale canvases from the 1950s and '60s, offering new insight into how place and personal relationships shaped their groundbreaking art.