Mother's figures

Painter Sally Michel's harvests the color fields

by Leon Nigrosh

SALLY MICHEL
At the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Avenue, Framingham, through January 30, 2000.

Throughout her career, painter Sally Michel has kept an air of freshness to her work. She painted every day next to her husband, Milton Avery (1885-1965), a renown artists whose paintings have a primitive charm often linked to Matisse. And as you move around the Danforth Museum of Art galleries, where 60 of Michel's works, from 1924 to 1990, are on display, you can immediately see that the figures, flowers, and landscapes are secondary to her exquisite and intuitive sense of color.

From the modest watercolor By the Pool, showing a solitary mauve woman dangling her feet in a deep-green pool against a warm green and blue background with a distant purple tree, to the boiling oil, Hot Nude, flashing an electric pink body against blistering red, each of Michel's paintings is a wonderland of hues and tones not usually found in traditional portraiture. Rather than painting what she sees, Michel paints what she feels. Color, in fact, is this woman's way of telling a story about her subject instead of merely replicating it.

Michel has been a prolific artist, who with Avery fostered the American Modernist movement, a style of painting that took off from European Fauvism and contained both high-key color and semi-abstract construction. Such Abstract Expressionist masters as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb viewed the Averys as their mentors and were greatly influenced by the work of this imaginative couple.

But, you may wonder, if Michel was a creative and driving force in the world of art, why has she been virtually overlooked? From the first day of their marriage, she decided that it would be Avery's job only to paint. She would be a wife, mother, his business manager, and, for a number of years, the family breadwinner.

This did not stop her from compiling a healthy inventory of works based on the normally mundane family life that played out around her. She continued to paint daily for her own enjoyment, and it was not until Avery's death in 1965 that she began to show her work.

Michel exploited her primary concern with color by scrapping any codified color theories. She played with odd combinations, hues, and tones to develop her faceless, universal subjects. Her large 1983 oil Lullabye focuses on a seated woman with a cat in her arms. But this simple scene soon dissolves into areas of bright red juxtaposed against two shades of blazing orange, which surround an oval of yellow and burnt sienna. Another work, Friends, is ostensibly an image of a woman and her dog, but, in actuality, is a bouquet of pinks and pale greens arranged with puffs of blue for accent.

The situation is similar with her 1976 Nude Reclining. The immediate image of a reclining female quickly becomes a competition for the viewer's attention between large, fluid areas of turquoise, yellow, green, and blue. Another nude completed that same year, Another Nude, is reduced to an arrangement of big, blocky, beige forms set in a pale blue wash. Michel's landscapes are rendered in much the same fashion; the details are subordinated in favor of the overall composition. Broad bands of color produce flat planes that interlock with one another, and the forms are exaggerated to fit the composition.

With so many varied images on view drawn from different stages of Michel's more than half-century career, it is remarkable how consistent her style and execution are from one work to the next. Her paintings reflect her life, and the grace and whimsy they exude form a universal language that even the most casual observer can appreciate and understand.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call 620-0050.