Happy City News brings Washington a seaside story told in paint: The Phillips Collection has just opened Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, on view from October 24, 2026, through January 24, 2027 — the first exhibition to examine in depth how friendship, artistic exchange and shared summers on Cape Ann in Gloucester, Massachusetts, shaped three of the most influential American artists of the 20th century: Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko.
The three met in New York City, but it was Gloucester that changed them. Avery, the eldest, first visited Cape Ann in the 1920s and introduced Gottlieb and Rothko to its rocky coast and sandy beaches in the 1930s, mentoring both. The summers they spent together painting, drawing and trading ideas became a foundation for experimentation and discovery across four decades of work. As Avery’s wife, the artist Sally Michel Avery, recalled, Gloucester was a place to “live like an artist” — a creative community and an escape from the pressures of New York.
Across approximately 90 paintings, watercolors, drawings and sketches, the exhibition traces that journey from Avery’s gentle modernist scenes toward the bold abstractions that made Gottlieb and Rothko famous, showing how a shared shoreline quietly redirected American art. A richly illustrated catalogue edited by Eliza Rathbone and published by Rizzoli Electa accompanies the show.
America’s first museum of modern art, at 1600 21st Street NW, is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is a luminous way to spend an autumn afternoon in Washington — three friends, one coast, and ninety works that still feel like summer.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
