Author Description

In the summer of 1957, Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko renewed a friendship that had begun in the late 1920s. All three were in Provincetown, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, in the light and by the sea, and over the next few extraordinary summers they interacted, and advanced and accelerated radical new ideas in their individual bodies of work. The Provincetown summers witnessed Avery's largest and most abstract paintings, such as “Sunset Sea” of 1958, and the development of new directions in Gottlieb's work, including his 1957 paintings “Blast II” and “Blue at Night.” This same time marked the darkening of Rothko's palette and, in 1958, the birth of the new forms found in the Seagram Murals and the later paintings of of the Harvard commission. Coming to Light is the first publication and exhibition to focus on the works of this period by each artist.