Milton Avery in Collinsville: The Power of Place

Celebrated American artist Milton Avery spent the summer of 1930 painting and sketching in the small Connecticut mill village of Collinsville, my hometown. His stay “turned Avery into the painter he would become,” observes Connecticut historian Gary Knoble. Up to that time, his paintings were “generally more ‘academic,’ while after Collinsville they became more ‘modern.’”  With this change, “his career as a painter really lifts off.”

The difference in colors, perspective and brushwork is easily seen when walking through “Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years,” an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum that includes the artist’s early work along with that of teachers and colleagues (image 1--all images credited below). If you can’t make it to the museum by October 17, 2021, the exhibition still lives between the pages of a beautifully illustrated catalog.

What caused Avery’s stylistic transformation that Collinsville summer of 1930? Perhaps it was a mystery to the artist himself. No doubt he brought with him ideas and influences along with his paints and pencils, canvasses and paper. But something jelled while he worked here, yielding new, innovative art. Could there have been something in this simple factory village from which he found inspiration, drew a fresh breath?

Collinsville (image 2) was a center of edge tool manufacture when Avery and his artist wife Sally arrived from their home in New York City. Fewer than 20 miles from Hartford where Avery grew up, it’s a quaint New England village ensconced between hills along the Farmington River, largest tributary of the Connecticut. Old fashioned redbrick and barnboard factory buildings stretched along the water, with a small commercial district just beyond, and houses terraced into hillsides that rose to a quilt of fields and woods. A community both bucolic and workaday practical, it’s a classic product of New England’s waterpowered industrial revolution.

By the time Avery arrived in Collinsville, he’d already spent time painting in communities with natural beauty and blue-collar economies, like fishing mecca Gloucester, Massachusetts. Maybe Collinsville’s mix of flowing water and topographic dimension combined with the energy of a community dedicated to manufacturing practical products, amplified the natural beauty that filled his work that summer.

While he didn’t depict the factory (image 3), its sprawling presence would have been unavoidable. Even looking toward distant hills as he painted, he couldn’t help but hear the rhythmic pounding of triphammers and the boom of the drop forge shaping metal into machetes and axes. Perhaps the grit of this small industrial town struck a chord with Avery, put him at ease in a way that gave rein to creative powers. After all, he’d come from a factory-work background. His father was a tanner, and Avery had held jobs as an assembler, lathe operator, mechanic and construction worker. 

Somehow, he tapped into the spirit of this place, an imaginative energy. Creative inspiration is often likened to a stream. Perhaps the tireless rush of the Farmington River tumbling over ledges awakens talent. Maybe the surrounding hills, training the eye to look toward the horizon, nurture innovation (image 4). Romans believed places were imbued with a characteristic guardian, a Genius loci. If so, creative expression is the genius of Collinsville. “Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence,” explained twentieth-century British novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence, “different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.” Avery touched that reality in a landscape shaped by flowing water, and channeled its streaming creative power.

Collinsville began coalescing in the late 1820s with houses, stores, churches, roads and bridges designed to serve the factory. The village started out as Avery’s work life did, engaged in utilitarian tasks. Samuel Collins, the principal company founder, built a successful business by bringing together raw materials, falling water for power, and innovative ideas to produce the highest quality products quickly and cheaply. He hired adroit mechanics of genius and vision, funding them even when temporarily unprofitable. Among them, was the ever-innovative and clever Elisha K. Root, who completely reinvented axe-making.

Probably the greatest mechanical virtuoso of the first half of the nineteenth century, Root worked for Collins from 1832 to 1849, until Samuel Colt hired him to design the machinery for his armory. The gun factory’s trademark blue onion dome became a Hartford symbol, no doubt a familiar sight to Avery in the 27 years he lived there. Root himself would himself become a symbol, the stuff of myth. Years after Root’s death in 1865, he reappeared as Mark Twain’s model for Hank Morgan, the machinist wizard hero of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Morgan could “make anything,” Twain wrote, “it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick newfangled way to make a thing,” he “could invent one.”

A flair for creativity grew even among ordinary Collins Company workmen, and by the time Avery painted here, there were hundreds of tool patterns, including a dizzying array of machetes and a baffling range of axes (image 5). Collins manufactured carpenter’s and ship adzes, cane knives, bush and pruning hooks, lances, hoes, picks, and mattocks. There were obscure blades used in Latin America like cavadores, tarpalas, and aquinches. Creative workmen transformed verbal descriptions, rough sketches, and wooden models into actual tools, sharp and well balanced.

New York State born in 1885, Avery moved with his family to Hartford in 1898 and lived there until 1925 when he moved to New York City. Working mostly at factory jobs, he signed up for a class in lettering at the Connecticut League of Art Students, and when the class was canceled shortly afterward, he took a life drawing class instead. He continued to pursue his artistic training, and in 1918 began studying at the Hartford Art School while working at night as a clerk for the Travelers Insurance Companies. Among paintings from this period in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s exhibition, are impressionist-influenced landscapes such as Hartford Woods (1919) (image 6), and East Hartford Meadows (1919). Rainbow Rocks, painted in Gloucester where he started summering in 1920, is similar in style. In 1924, Avery met the artist Sally Michel in Gloucester. They were married in 1926, and she would work as a free-lance illustrator to support their family.

Avery’s early paintings reflect the conservative, academic style of his teachers, and then the influence of American Impressionists from whom he learned about the singularity of place and a sensitivity to each moment in nature. In 1925, he moved to New York City where he frequented galleries and museums, exposing himself to French modernists and other cutting-edge painters. “By 1930, references to Matisse and Picasso can be discerned in Avery’s paintings,” according to the website of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “and he began to introduce the simplified forms and flattened space that would, along with clear, unmodulated color, become the hallmarks of his later work.” He gained renown for this style, which began emerging during his 1930 summer in Collinsville.

Avery was not the first prominent American artist to come to Collinsville, nor the last. Engraver John Warner Barber was here in the 1830s, and created an image with worker houses, factory buildings, and hills beyond (image 7). The houses, he noted, “are painted white, and when contrasted with the deep-green foliage in the immediate vicinity, present a novel and beautiful appearance.”

Frederick Law Olmsted, father of American landscape architecture, spent about 18 months in Collinsville in the late 1830s while studying civil engineering, the only formal training he would have for his future profession. Still in his teens, Olmsted watched as the community grew around him with new homes and shops, roads and drainage systems built into hillsides, lessons more compelling than those from lectures and books. Short walks took him beyond the factory, houses, and noise. He climbed surrounding hills, he wrote his stepmother, “where naught is heard save the indistinct clink of anvils & the distant roaring of water as it passes gracefully over the half natural dam of the beautiful Farmington.” Perhaps here, he first sensed that remoteness could be experienced close to urban activity and factories if buildings were screened by hills and trees, his signature innovation in the city parks he would design.

Mid-nineteenth-century short-story writer and poet Rose Terry Cooke (image 8), whose work appeared in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote her most famous poem in Collinsville. “The Two Villages” contrasts the bustling village of the living in the valley with the quiet of the hillside cemetery, a village of the dead. Avery would sketch and paint from the silent village, while gazing down into busy streets below.

Photographer Walker Evans came to Collinsville on assignment from Fortune magazine for a 1946 article about the Collins Company, by then considered an old-fashioned firm with little interest in innovation. Several factory and street images made it into the magazine. Taken about 15 years after Avery’s summer stay, they depict a community slightly down-at-the-heels, but still vibrant with handsome nineteenth-century buildings, elm-lined streets, and the railroad delivering freight. Created for practical, documentary purposes, these photographs are nevertheless works of art capturing the essence of Collinsville, some from unusual perspectives. About 40 are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Perhaps too close to the drudgery of his early work experiences, Avery was not drawn to the factory buildings, and produced just a few images of the village, including rooftops, the hillside cemetery, and church belfry. Rather, he found inspiration in the undulating topography patched with woods, meadows, and fields (image 9). While few sites Avery depicted can be located on the ground today with precision, he captured the vital nature of the landscape without slavishly reproducing it. “He would simplify, flatten, distort, or chromatically abstract a landscape,” wrote Whitney Museum of American Art curator Barbara Haskell. “He never introduced elements into the composition which did not exist in the physical world. He would not invent what was not there.”

Belying its small size, Collinsville furnished Avery with richly diverse subject matter. Most of all, he focused on nearby agriculture, painting backyard chickens, cows, and pigs (image 10). Sally called it “the summer we spent following cows.” These farm animals are the most finished of his Collinsville work, where he “simplified his forms and thinned his brushstrokes, lending his work an imaginative, poetic feeling,” according to Wadsworth Atheneum curator Erin Monroe. Later that year, the famed museum director Chick Austin chose to include four Avery paintings from his summer excursion in an exhibition of living artists during the winter of 1930-31. Afterward, as Knoble put it, Avery “soars.”

The Collins Company closed in 1966, a victim of the lack of investment and innovation that the Fortune article Walker Evans illustrated had observed. But the spirit of this place, its Genius loci, didn’t leave. Creativity does not evaporate, it changes form, not unlike physical energy in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics.

At first, the shuttered old factory provided cheap rents and large spaces for artists, starting with the Factory Five shortly after the axe works went out. Later, glassblower Ken Carder set up his kiln, and woodworkers, sculptors, photographers and craftspeople of all stripes moved into spaces where tools had been forged, polished and packed. With little maintenance over decades, the buildings began falling apart, but local artists from painters to potters to jewelers continue to persist with studios in homes, barns, storefronts and garages. Plein air work is not an uncommon sight in Collinsville, even during winter’s grip (image 11).

There are poets and novelists among us, and occasional public readings. The Farmington Valley Stage Company is the latest among generations of thespians performing beneath the quaint proscenium arch of the town hall auditorium. For a few years, there was even a film festival.

Music has always been a part of village life, starting with church choirs. Brass bands have called Collinsville home since 1890 (image12), and the Farmington Valley Band, organized in 1941, continues to practice and play here. For the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the Maxwell Shepherd Memorial Arts Fund brought topnotch classical music to the Congregational Church, including performances on the church’s world class Flentrop organ. Music continues to blossom, with rock, folk, blues, and jazz performed on the streets and in bars and restaurants, including Lasalle Market’s long-running Friday night open mic. An imaginative energy in Collinsville ensures that while manifestations of creativity may morph, the muses remain. One art or artist kindles another in continuous, if sometimes subtle sparks of inspiration.

Milton Avery connected with Collinsville’s creative metabolism, not only finding inspiration for a new way of painting that had been percolating within him, but weaving his own brilliance into the story of this place. He gave lasting expression to a landscape where nature and culture maintain almost palpable intimacy (image 13). He tapped into the flow of a village that superficially seems run-of-the-mill, and created lasting images enabling residents and visitors to look at the world anew through the eyes of a genius.

 

Image Credits

1. Author gallery photo from "Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art." Haying, 1930, pastel on paper (left); Hay Wagon, 1930, oil on canvas (right).
2. "Main Street, Collinsville." Courtesy Canton Historical Society.
3. Author photo.
4. Author gallery photo from "Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art." Untitled, n.d., pencil & lithocrayon on paper (top); Untitled, 1930, pencil on paper (bottom).
5. "Collins Tools." Courtesy Canton Historical Society.
6. Milton Avery (American, 1885-1965) Hartford Woods, 1919. Oil on board, 11 ½ x 15 in. The Milton Avery Trust. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
7. John Warner Barber, "Western View of Collinsville, in Canton," from Connecticut Historical Collections, 1836.  Courtesy Connecticut Historical Society.
8. Author photo of book in author's collection.
9. Milton Avery (American, 1885-1965), Untitled (Landscape), c. 1930. Watercolor on paper, 15 x 22 in. Private Collection. © 2021 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
10. Author gallery photo "Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art." Roosters, c. 1930, watercolor on paper (left); Untitled (Tri-colored Bovines), n.d., watercolor on paper (middle); Cows on Hillside, c. 1930-31, oil on canvas (right).
11. Author photo.
12. "Red Men Boys Band, Collinsville, 1933." Courtesy Canton Historical Society.
13. Author gallery photo from "Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. "Untitled (Cow, Bull & Fence), n.d., watercolor on paper.