On a recent June morning, Cape Ann Museum director Oliver Barker basked in the presence of a heavy, wooden crate that had traveled to Gloucester from New York. It contained a large canvas he was giddy to greet.
“I’ve been working for museums for 30 years, and I would say this is perhaps one of the most exciting moments,” he said. “This work by Mark Rothko was a late addition to our exhibition check list.”
Rothko’s huge, late-career paintings routinely break multi-million dollar records at auction houses. But the celebrated 20th century artist developed his style — and lifelong friendships — as a young man in Gloucester. Now the museum is telling their story in a milestone exhibition that’s been years in the making.
“Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea” boasts 79 loans from 26 institutions, including the artists’ estates, the National Gallery of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. The 1961 painting by Rothko, from The Museum of Modern Art, was too big to fit in the elevator, so handlers rolled its crate through the building’s galleries, carried it up the stairs, and gently laid it on the floor. Assistant curator Leon Doucette used a drill to unscrew its top while a small crowd waited for the big reveal.
The museum director gasped. “How amazing is that?” he asked as his eyes passed over “No. 14 (Horizontals, White over Darks).” Rothko’s painting boasts hazy swaths of white, black, and grays on an earthy background.
“It’s what people think of when they hear the name Mark Rothko,” Eliza Rathbone said. She orchestrated the exhibition and is chief curator emerita at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. which also partnered on the show.
“What I’m excited about is that people will see works that they wouldn’t immediately expect,” Rathbone said, “and much earlier work when he was on Cape Ann with Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb.”
Milton Avery, a prolific painter known for his luminous landscapes, first visited Cape Ann in the 1920s. Other New York artists flocked there, including Edward Hopper, to escape the city’s summer heat. The peninsula’s famous light and dramatic terrain were also tantalizing. “It’s an artist’s paradise,” Rathbone said.
Rathbone herself moved to Cape Ann about a decade ago. Over her long career she curated separate shows on the three artists and their work. But while writing about Avery she had a revelation. Rathbone knew the artists were friends, but said she realized, “there had never been an exhibition about their friendship — at least not like this which follows it through three decades.”
In 1932 Avery invited Rothko and Gottlieb to Gloucester. They were both 18 years younger than Avery and still forging their paths. Avery set an example.
“He was really a mentor — not a teacher,” Rathbone said. “He didn’t tell anyone what to do. He just did what he was doing, and they did it too.”
Avery also showed his younger peers that pursuing the life of an artist was possible, even if it might not be a lucrative one.
Rathbone walked into a gallery hung with dozens of watercolors that look like postcards from the trio’s summer trips. Avery captured a scene in 1932 of people viewing a total solar eclipse at Good Harbor. Rothko recorded loose forms of bathers reclining on the sand, and figures playing handball.
Rathbone said the action scene was unusual for Rothko, but “playing handball is one of the things they did when they were young on the beach, tired of sketching and painting perhaps.”
The three artists roamed around Gloucester hunting for subjects to document. So we walked down to the waterfront to experience how the country’s oldest seaport inspired them.
“When you look out on the harbor — and see the docks and piers and boats and reflections in the water and the light — it’s so recognizable. You see their work in these views,” Rathbone said, standing beside a pile of lobster traps as gulls screeched overhead.
Even detritus on the beach was captivating for Gottlieb, an Abstract Expressionist. Some of his Cape Ann paintings feature dead fish he gathered on the beach, then put into boxes. Rathbone said Gottlieb dove more deeply into surrealism in the 1940s.
The curator emphasized how those summers in Gloucester were critical to the three artists’ sense of what a painting could be. They evolved together, and the younger artists ultimately influenced Avery’s works on large canvases. In the show, their later abstract paintings fill a gallery of their own.
While Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko had different temperaments and backgrounds, they still formed something of a bromance. Rathbone laughed at that suggestion, then said, “Well, it was a strong one clearly, because it lasted throughout their lives.”
And now, decades after their deaths, they’re reunited in a show with many works never before seen by the public.
“They were created here, and they’ve remained with these artists’ estates,” Barker said. “And it is wonderful to think about the conversations that they would have had here about this place.”
Barker hopes “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea” makes a big splash as its debut coincides with the Cape Ann Museum’s reopening after a 20-month renovation. The exhibition also marks the first time a show that originated there will travel. It heads to The Phillips Collection in October.
“Avery Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea” is on view at the Cape Ann Museum through Sept. 27.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR