Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism will feature works by an artist who has come to be more fully appreciated only recently. Among the works on display will be Single Palm (below left), Untitled (below right) and Bill and Friends (above). Michel happily sublimated her own artistic career to help support that of her husband, proto-modernist Milton Avery. Courtesy Mennello Museum of American Art.
An artist in full emerges from her husband’s shadow.
By Richard Reep
Many visitors to the Mennello Museum of American Art may be fond of a painting called Bill and Friends by Sally Michel. A treasured part of the museum’s permanent collection, the modernist work depicts three people sitting at an outdoor table, perhaps relaxing after a picnic.
Michel died in 2003 at the age of 101 and left a legacy of paintings from the 1930s through the 1990s that have only rarely been shown in exhibitions and never shown at all in Florida—although two works, Bill and Friends and Single Palm, were completed in Maitland.
That oversight is about to be corrected. The Mennello will host Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism from September 20 to January 12, 2025. On view will be 33 paintings and 17 works that trace the artist’s journey over a span of six decades.
“This is a first for Florida, and Michel’s first exhibit in 23 years,” says Katherine Page, curator of art and education. For the past three years, Page has worked with the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and D. Wigmore Fine Art—a gallery in New York City—as well as private collectors to make the long-overdue recognition a reality.
“Michel’s artistic practice was one of patience and passion as she stood aside to afford her husband the limelight,” says Page. “She sketched her ideas regularly and analyzed her compositions and techniques with peers to find a method of portraying a feeling beyond words—building a meaningful body of work that reflects universal moments of enjoyment.”
Michel and her husband, proto-modernist Milton Avery, shared studio space and painted side by side, eventually developing a mutual style that included the use of simplified abstractions, mostly in landscape and figurative genres, and unusual juxtapositions of color. By the late 1940s, Avery was the more professionally accomplished of the two.
A Brooklyn native, Michel met Avery in the 1920s in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He pursued her back to New York City, where they later married. Michel, who was an illustrator for The New York Times Magazine, promoted Avery’s career and said: “I wanted all the spotlight to be on Milton.”
When Avery suffered a heart attack in 1949, Michel applied for a dual residency at André Smith’s Research Studio—now the Maitland Art Center—to get her husband out of the city and into someplace tropical and restorative. They brought their daughter and enjoyed their stay so much that they came back the following year.
Michel, who continued to paint and draw, developed a strong, austere artistic style reflective of Tonalism, a style that uses a limited color range to create subtle tone gradations and to capture how a scene strikes the artist emotionally and psychologically.
But her output continued to be overshadowed by that of Avery—who died in 1965—until D. Wigmore Fine Art mounted a solo exhibition in 2022. Roberta Smith, an art critic for The New York Times, was impressed and noted that Michel’s work “has been seen as a knockoff of her husband’s but her contribution to its formation has yet to be fully recognized.”
Until now, perhaps. An opening reception for Abstracting Tonalism is set for Friday, September 20, at 6:30 p.m. On display will be Michel’s drawings, paintings, an early gouache study and some of her later oil paintings—including the two paintings that she created while decamped in Maitland.
On Saturday, September 21, at 1 p.m. the museum will host a panel discussion with Page; art critic Eleanor Hartney, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalog; and artist Sean Cavanaugh, who is the grandson of Michel. Admission to either the reception or the panel discussion is $10.
“The museum is delighted to present a comprehensive survey of Michel’s artwork that contributes to a greater appreciation and visibility for her achievements as an artist,” says Shannon Fitzgerald, executive director.
She continues: “We’re proud to generate new scholarship and provide a generous context for such a remarkable artist, who like many female artists of the time, didn’t receive critical contexts during their lifetimes.”
Mennello Museum of American Art is located at 900 East Princeton Street, Orlando, in Loch Haven Cultural Park. For more information, visit mennellomuseum.org or call 407.246.4278.
