In the 1930s and ’40s, three influential American artists escaped the stifling crowds and heat of New York City summers for the rocky shores of Cape Ann, finding inspiration not only in its working harbors and natural beauty, but also in one another. Now, the Cape Ann Museum is telling that story of artistic camaraderie with Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, a landmark exhibition featuring 82 works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko.
“We’re talking about three titans of 20th-century American art, all of whom had really formative experiences here on Cape Ann,” says Oliver Barker, director of the Cape Ann Museum. “They met in New York, but they really solidified their friendships here during a series of successive summers. And this is a story that has not really been told before.” The exhibition, on view at the Cape Ann Museum from June 30 through September 27, coincides with the reopening of the museum’s main campus, which was closed for 20 months for renovations and improvements. In October, the exhibition will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., marking the first time an exhibition organized by the Cape Ann Museum will tour to a national museum.
Each of the three painters would go on to become giants of American art in their own right. In those early years, however, Milton Avery—the oldest of the three—was already an established modern painter when he met Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who were then emerging abstract expressionists. Avery later introduced Gottlieb and Rothko to Cape Ann. “They were very close friends, despite the fact that Milton Avery was 18 years older than Rothko and Gottlieb,” says guest curator Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita of The Phillips Collection. “They saw him as a mentor.”
The exhibition spans decades of work, tracing both the artists’ stylistic evolution and their enduring friendship. It also reframes Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko not solely as New York artists, highlighting the influence of the sea during their summers in Gloucester and later Provincetown. “The fact that they found each other repeatedly in the summertime—in the same place, at the same time—and went out sketching together, spending evenings sharing their work and ideas, makes this one of the most fascinating stories of artistic exchange I’ve ever worked on,” Rathbone says.
Barker notes that the exhibition is organized into nine sections, with roughly half devoted to early works leading up to the 1940s. The second half showcases the large-scale canvases the artists produced in the 1950s and ’60s, including a seven-foot-long, 56-inch high painting by Mark Rothko on loan from the Museum of Modern Art. “Visitors entering that space will be surrounded by these mature works for which all three artists are perhaps best known,” Barker says.
Because of its scale, the exhibition occupies the Cape Ann Museum’s entire fourth floor, giving it “the breadth that it needs,” Barker says. By comparison, the museum’s acclaimed 2023 Edward Hopper exhibition filled only half of that floor. The Cape Ann Museum collaborated with 26 lending institutions—including 16 museums and the artists’ families—to assemble the show, resulting in an exhibition that features not only well-known paintings but also a wide array of rarely seen works.
“I hope viewers will become deeply engaged in their process, because we will have sketchbooks, drawings, watercolors, and finished paintings,” Rathbone says. The exhibition celebrates not only Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko as artists and friends, but also Cape Ann as a gathering place for creative exchange—making it a fitting tribute to the museum’s reopening. “As a museum, we exist to tell the story of this singularly unique place,” Barker says. “We do that by blending stories of labor and ingenuity with those of beauty and creativity, all of which have coalesced—and continue to coalesce—here on Cape Ann.”