Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994 TAG: 9403060060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
"She had been protecting me," Avery said, sitting in the fourth-floor walk-up and stroking Murdock, her daughter's cat. "She never told me how sick she was or that the cancer had come back. It was terrible. When I got here, she could barely walk."
Two days after Christmas, Rose Avery was carried down the narrow stairs and taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital.
The next day, her mother, strong-willed and clearheaded, began a devoted vigil that was to last two months. Each morning, she left the three-room apartment, taking the bus to the hospital where she sat at Rose's bedside.
As darkness fell in this winter of frequent snows, she returned to the box-like rooms on Ludlow Street. In a city where she knew no one, the octogenarian woman tended to motherhood.
As she carried food up the stairs, and fed the cat, and wondered whether she could get her arthritic legs into and out of the bathtub in the kitchen, Claire Avery was tormented by worry. What, she kept asking herself, would happen to Rose's paintings? What should she do with them in case her daughter died?
They were all over the apartment, perhaps 30 or 40 canvases. Some hung on walls and some were stacked in corners. Mostly they showed street scenes and street people of the Lower East Side.
In her sorrow, Claire Avery had not found the neighborhood particularly inviting. She missed the weather of Florida and the golf course. The dirty streets, the loud radios were so very different from what she remembered of her native Boston or the places on the West Coast and in the Midwest, where she had lived while her husband, an engineer, was alive.
But from the paintings, anyone could see that Rose Avery had loved these streets and the people who were her neighbors. The art was peopled with Chinese shoppers, Latin grocers, Russians at street fairs.
There were old-fashioned bums from the Bowery and representatives of the area's younger types, green-haired girls and black-leathered boys. They filled the space, and their images bore into Claire Avery's mind and heart.
This was the world her daughter had chosen after studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale. This was where she settled, teaching at a Chinese nursery school, worshiping at a Russian church and painting.
Claire Avery felt the paintings should be seen. It would be awful, she thought, if they ended up being scattered or discarded. They did not belong in Florida. Whatever happened, she felt, they should be somewhere where people could understand their testimony.
By late January, as Rose weakened, her mother, haunted by the need to find a place for the paintings, phoned this columnist inviting him to look at her daughter's work. Impressed by the paintings and by the painter's mother, the columnist proposed writing a story about the Avery women. Perhaps some reader might offer a solution.
"Oh, no," said Claire Avery. "I don't think Rose would let me do that. She is such a private person. I know it would embarrass her to think that people were paying attention to her paintings because of her illness or her mother. She never promoted herself. She just kept painting. I don't think you can write about the paintings while she is alive."
Wednesday, Rose Avery died at the hospital. Her mother was at her side. A memorial Mass was held at the small Russian chapel on the Lower East Side where Rose, as Irish-looking as her mother, had worshiped because she loved the music and the liturgy.
"It was a beautiful service," said Claire Avery. She added that she was thankful for the help she had from her daughter's friends and neighbors and from family friends from New England. In her mourning, she was also pleased to have found a respectful home for the paintings.
In the last week of Rose's life, the elderly woman from Florida had made contact with the Tenement Museum, a growing institution whose exhibits at several locations document and portray the still valid melting pot experience so long associated with the Lower East Side.
Anita Jacobson, the curator, examined the paintings and said the museum would be willing to show them and introduce them to collectors. "They recall the work of Edward Hopper, but with an ethnic flavor," she said. "They have a great deal of character, with a roughness in texture that is like the neighborhood. I like that quality."
Soon, Claire Avery will be able to leave the place on Ludlow Street to return to Florida. Her heart will be heavy but her work will have been done.
by CNB