Book excerpt: Milton Avery's Vermont accompanies a summer, 2016 exhibition at the Bennington Museum which takes the first focused look at the work this prominent American modernist created based on six summers of intense activity in southern Vermont between 1935 and 1943. Avery regularly spent his summers traveling with his family in search of new material, and may have been drawn to Vermont by his friend Meyer Schapiro, one of the foremost art historians of the twentieth century. Noted for his simultaneous commitment to exploring the formal, abstract qualities of art and creating representational images drawn from his daily encounters with people and places, Avery captured his family's summer activities and his personal response to the Vermont landscape in works characterized by bold, gestural marks and bright, non-associative colors. Milton Avery's Vermont examines Avery's artistic process through pencil sketches executed en plein air, fresh watercolors based on his sketches, and major oil paintings.