David Brown Milne

Milne had been living and working in New York City for ten years when five of his paintings were selected for inclusion in the 1913 Armory Show. An early landmark for the artist, his work was shown alongside works by the titans of the 20th century – Hopper, Cassatt, Matisse, Redon, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Van Gogh, to name a few. Of Milne’s paintings selected, three were watercolours – a reminder of the primacy of the medium at the turn of the century.

Heavy Forms, also painted in 1913, perfectly encapsulates Milne’s style from this period, particularly in the restricted palette. In the present work, only four colours are used – green, red, purple, and blue. Of note is the royal blue used in Heavy Forms, quite rare in his oeuvre – only a few watercolours from this period display this intense colour.

Milne was known for the detail he left out rather than included in his compositions, relying instead on strong linear structure to evoke space and mood rather than describe it literally. Snowy hillsides, forest ponds, and modest interiors become almost abstract arrangements, balancing emptiness with a few carefully placed marks. This “less is more” approach led critics to describe him as the “Master of Absence,” capturing emotional depth with striking visual understatement.

Another hallmark of Milne’s work evidenced in Heavy Forms is the application of watercolour pigment almost straight from the tube, using barely-diluted, heavy brushstrokes. Art historian David P. Silcox explains that “perhaps it was Cézanne’s example that encouraged Milne to lay himself open to new and dangerous ideas, to ‘split himself apart by making something no one had made before, to see things as they had never been seen before.”[1] Cézanne’s use of colour and empty space triggered in Milne a new approach in his work, specifically an economy of colour and brushstrokes.

Also of note in this painting is Milne’s use of white space to heighten the composition’s visual impact. The negative spaces enhance the artist’s gestures and let the composition breathe. This technique is one of Milne’s major achievements of the early 1910s, setting him apart from the rest of his Canadian contemporaries.

Milne’s selection for the Armory Show led to better recognition. In 1915, the critic for the New York Times said the following about Milne’s works: “Some of his figures are boldly and richly outlined in color and the rhythm of these flexible lines contributes to the charm of the composition. The whole is very brilliant, very animated, conceived with vigor and executed with dexterity but not entirely free from the suggestion of separate effects brought together but not fused in one impression. Another picture by the same artist which he calls “Tri-Color” is even more brilliant and direct with its childlike pattern of red and blue and white, but the cleverly varied touches of the brush, the play of the strong red and strong blue over the white ground, the finely suggested perspective make it a subtler performance despite its apparently primitive structure and drastic division of tones. Here the fusion takes place at a proper distance and the effect is one of artistic unity.”[2]

[1] D. P. Silcox, Painting place: The Life and Work of David B. Milne, University of Toronto Press, 1996, p.36.
[2] “we met Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Brancusi. For the first time, we saw courage and imagination bare, not sweetened by sentiment and smothered in technical skill.” Milne quoted in Silcox. p.48.